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THE AMERICAN BOOKS 

A LIBRARY OF GOOD CITIZENSHIP 



"The American Books" are designed as a 
series of authoritative manuals, discussing 
problems of interest in America to-day. 



THE AMERICAN BOOKS 

THE AMERICAN COLLEGE BY ISAAC SHARPLESS 

THE INDIAN TO-DAY BY CHARLES A. EASTMAN 

COST OF LIVING BY FABIAN FRANKLIN 

THE AMERICAN NAVY BY REAR-ADMIRAL FRENCH E. 

CHADWICK, U. S. N. 

MUNICIPAL FREEDOM BY OSWALD RYAN 

AMERICAN LITERATURE BY LEON KELLNER 

(translated from the GERMAN BY JULIA FRANKLIN) 

SOCIALISM IN AMERICA BY JOHN MACY 

AMERICAN IDEALS BY CLAYTON SEDGWICK COOPER 

THE AMERICAN SCHOOL BY WALTER S. HINCHMAN 

THE FEDERAL RESERVE BY HENRY PARKER WILLIS 

{For more extended notice of the series y see the last pages 
of this book.) 



The American Books 

AMERICAN 
IDEALS 



BY 

CLAYTON SEDGWICK COOPER 




GARDEN CITY NEW YORK 

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 
1915 



.1 
.C77 



Copyright, igiS, hy 
DOUBLEDAY, PaGE & CoMPANY 

All rights reserved, including that of 

translation into foreign languages^ 

including the Scandinavian 



1tl- 

m 2 1915 

)CU416428 



BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 

Clayton Sedgwick Cooper was born at Hen- 
derson, Jefferson County, New York, in 1869. 
He was educated at Adams Collegiate Institute, 
Brown University C94), Union and Rochester 
Theological Seminaries, and has done graduate 
work at Harvard and Columbia (A. M. Colum- 
bia, 1907). 

Heserved as General Secretary of theTwenty- 
Third Street Young Men's Christian Association, 
New York City, 1895-98; pastor of the Wash- 
ington Street Baptist Church, Lynn, Mass., 
1 898-1 902; and College Secretary for Bible Study 
of the International Young Men's Christian As- 
sociation, 1902-1912. In his work Mr. Cooper 
has been brought in touch with colleges and 
college men throughout the United States 
and Canada; this led to his travelling abroad 
to study education and religious movements in 
other lands. He has made two extended trips 
around the world investigating educational 
institutions, particularly in England, North 
Africa, Egypt, India, Malay States, the Philip- 



Biographical Note 

pines, China, Korea, and Japan. He has lectured 
extensively (for the Pond Lyceum Bureau and 
independently) on Educational, Oriental, and 
Religious Topics. He is now co-editor of Edu- 
cational Foundations, New York, and a frequent 
contributor to magazines and periodicals. 

Mr. Cooper is also the author of: 

College Men and the Bible 

The Bible and Modern Life 

World Wide Bible Study 

Why Go TO College? 

The Man of Egypt 

Bible Study in the Work of Life 

The Modernizing of the Orient 



I am one of those who believe that the real will never find an 
irremovable basis till it rests on the ideal. 

— James Russell Lowell. 

I respect the man who knows distinctly what he wishes. 
The greater part of all the mischief in the world arises from the 
fact that men do not sufficiently understand their own aims. 
They have undertaken to build a tower and spend no more labor 
on the foundation than would be necessary to erect a hut. 

— Goethe. 



PREFACE 

Elihu Root, speaking not long since before the 
Union League Club of Philadelphia, said : "The 
tendencies of a nation are all that count." 

Tendencies in a nation as in an individual are 
but the shadows of ideals, consciously or un- 
consciously held in the mind and giving direc- 
tion and dynamic to the forces of the will. 
The diflFerence between men and nations de- 
pends upon their answer to the question, "What 
makes life worth living? " Find out a country's 
ideals, and with some certainty you can predict 
her destiny. Is her ideal the song of the sword ? 
Weltmacht oder Niedergang ? Then her rewards 
will be in the terms of the sword, or in brute 
force. Is her chief and all-absorbing ideal 
money? Then she must give up hope of reach- 
ing the highest culture of mind and spirit. The 
things we imagine and admire in the germ cells 
of our brain inevitably mould us; they become 
our masters. Ideals are things to be chosen 
with some care, for whether we know it or not 
they are the gods before whom we pour out our 



X PREFACE 

costliest libations, the idols the light of whose 
faces colors by reflection or refraction all our 
worship. 

It is not altogether the attainment or the 
non-attainment of our ideals that indicates our 
progress or our power. Dreams are like ocean 
horizons — they recede at our approach. But if 
we, like true sailors, keep our ships ever trained 
toward those high retreating skies regardless of 
wind and bad weather, we, like they, are pretty 
sure to sail "beyond the sunset." 

It has been with the effort to catch some of 
the inner colors from which the efficient artist 
hand of the American is painting his national 
and individual portrait, that I have written the 
following pages. By looking into the energetic 
faces of our streaming crowds, as well as by 
drawing some distinguishing contrasts between 
ourselves and other nations, I have tried to 
point out some of the strongest currents in our 
present idealism, and I have also ventured to 
indicate here and there an embankment that 
must be strengthened to restrain the flooding 
tides threatening our dearest hopes. 

If I have succeeded in any measure in fixing 
upon the moving ideal forces that rise so fleet- 
ingly to the surface in our varied and vast Kfe 



PREFACE xi 

and enterprises, it has been largely due to a 
wide circle of men and women who have afforded 
me the inestimable opportunity to view our 
contemporary modern activities through their 
eyes. 

The testimony of certain of these people, 
chosen with some care and representing twenty 
different states in the Union, I have given in the 
chapter entitled "An American Symposium." 

c. s. c. 

The Red House hy the Lake, 
W estcolangy Pa., 
August, igiS' 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGB 

Preface ix 

I. What is an American? 3 

1 Personification of Activity 

2 A Time-saver 

3 An Apostle of Bigness 

4 He Wants Money 

5 Desire for Success 

II. Utilitarian Idealists 33 

1 The Strain of Sentiment 

2 The Democracy of IdeaHsm 

3 Idealism in the New Literature 

4 Sense of Humor and Reality 

III. The Square Deal — Both Ways. . 71 

1 Constitutional Rights 

2 Square Deal in Business 

3 What is Equality? 

4 From Business to Brotherhood 

IV. American versus English Ideals . 99 

1 The Distinction of Merit 

2 Contrast of Feeling and Expression 

3 Adaptability 

4 Attitude Toward Wealth 

V. American versus Oriental Idealism 127 

1 Our Eastern Rootage 

2 Spiritual Resemblances 



xiv Contents 

CHAPTER PAGE 

3 Missionary Aims 

4 Ideas versus Action 

5 Romance and Mysticism 

VI. Education the American Passion . 159 

1 Inheritances 

2 New England Foundations 

3 Utilitarian Drifts 

4 Weaknesses 

5 The Teacher, the Turning-point 

VII. Ideals in Religion 193 

1 Is the Church Adequate? 

2 American Religious Nature 

3 Tolerance 

4 Socialized Religion 

5 Germany as an Example 

6 The Faith of the Individual 

VIII. Attitude Toward the Immigrant . 229 

1 The Avalanche 

2 America as an Assimilator 

3 Forces at Work 

4 Discovery of Talent in the Immi- 

grant 

IX. The Shadow of Success .... 253 

1 Disregard for Law 

2 Business Inefficiency Due to Haste 

3 Peace at any Price 

4 Love of Display and Extravagance 

X. An American Symposium .... 287 

1 American Ideals as Seen by Amer- 

icans 

2 Analysis of One Hundred Answers 

Concerning American Ideals 



Contents xv 



PAGE 



3 American Weakness as Seen by Con- 

temporary Americans 

4 Replies Analyzed 

5 The Triumph of Our Ideals 

XI. America Coming of Age .... 333 

1 The Providential Republic 

2 At the Beginning of the Enterprise 

3 Peace and Humanity the Final Ideals 

Index 355 



CHAPTER I 
WHAT IS AN AMERICAN? 

The bigger the work, the greater the joy in doing 
it. The whole-hearted striving and wrestHng with 
difficulties, the laying hold with firm grip and level 
head in calm resolution of the monster and tugging 
and toiling and wrestling at it, to-day, to-morrow, 
and the next day, until it is done — it is the soldier's 
creed of forward, ever forward; it is the man's creed 
that for this task he has been born. 

Henry M. Stanley. 



CHAPTER I 

WHAT IS AN AMERICAN? 

America, like Africa, is a land of surprises. To 
a foreigner. Uncle Sam's citizens have been 
difficult to analyze, not because they are so 
many and various, but by reason of their 
rapidly changing moods. Like the Oriental, 
who, just as you think you have at last dis- 
cerned his true nature, does something to upset 
entirely all your calculations, the American has 
the habit of disarranging the customary char- 
acterizations of the foreigner by unlooked-for 
manifestations of traits as puzzling as they are 
complex. 

The perplexity and paradox of the American 
character has been summarized by two French 
collaborators, who wrote some years since under 
the title: "L'Oncle Sam Chez Lui** — 



Formed out of an aggregation of different races, 
the American people forms a race by itself — individ- 
ual, and from many points of view very superior. 

3 



4 American Ideals 

It is as ridiculous to say that it is solely Anglo-Saxon 
as that it is Latin. The American has neither the 
egotism of the Englishman nor the arrogance of the 
German, but he possesses their practical sense; he 
has not the light-heartedness of the Frenchman, but 
his suppleness; he has not the obsequious politeness 
of the Italian or the Spaniard, but a profound respect 
for established institutions. He is a man of surprises. 
One appreciates and esteems him, one does not 
judge him. 



In a sense the problem of disentangling from 
the intricately woven web of a new and rapidly 
evolving civilization the inner threads of motive 
and ideal, is not mitigated by the fact that the 
attempt is made by an American and not a 
stranger. The tendency to overlook the obvious, 
and the ever-present impediment of narrow 
perspective and lack of detachment, are the 
almost inevitable accompaniments of an inter- 
pretation, ever so desirously fair, made by one 
who writes of his own and not an alien land. 
It may be a solacing compensation to the native 
expounder to believe that what he loses in 
landscape he makes up in light, in that 
illuminating and intuitive understanding rising 
out of common participation and traditions, 
almost a prerequisite in the endeavor to pierce 



What is an American 5 

below the external signs of national changes 
to the elemental nature and vital aims of a race. 

What is an American? The question is saved 
from ineptitude by our present need to know 
well its answer. With the guns of Europe 
reverberating almost in our very ears, with 
America omnipresent in the hopes and hearts of 
wellnigh every nation beneath the circHng 
stars, with our forty-eight closely united com- 
monwealths opulent beyond even their fairest 
dreams, with our great cities struggling in the 
gestation of millions of as yet unformed alien 
populations, with scientific and industrial 
achievements staggering the imagination, with 
possibilities exceeded by nothing save our prob- 
lems, it is a fit time to know ourselves and our 
ideals. 

In the light of our responsibilities, it is en- 
couraging to be able to say that the American 
is first of all a man of action. He is the person- 
ification of the hfe dynamic. Activity is the 
basic law of his being. He is the lover of huge 
and hard tasks, for these furnish resistance to 
his energetic will. Obstacles to him, as to 
Napoleon, are just things to be overcome. Dr. 
Bowring once wrote to a tyrannous French 
minister: "Sir, I am calm but energetic." The 



6 American Ideals 

American is seldom calm, but he is invariably 
energetic. Every active adjective is the epit- 
ome of him — enthusiastic — inquisitive — eager 
— earnest — affectionate — vivacious — loquacious 
— sprightly — adaptable — acquisitive — extrava- 
gant — busy — hurried — zestful. He is the highly 
vitaUzed embodiment of the moving life prin- 
ciple, always livingly creative, never static. 

The citizen of the United States is by nature 
and by training a business man, and business 
to him spells busyness. His first and foremost 
ideal is to work; "immersed in business" is the 
colloquial phrase. A sickroom to him is a 
prison, and there is nothing more forlorn be- 
neath the sun than an American business man 
on an extended holiday. Mr. S. S. McClure in 
his autobiography has drawn a composite picture 
of a business man in these Western lands: "At 
college," he writes, "everything went well 
with me until Friday night, and then a blank 
stretched before me. It always seemed a hard 
pull until Monday. I was never able to lay 
aside the interests and occupations of my Hfe 
with any pleasure, and I have always experi- 
enced a sense of dreariness on going into houses 
where one was supposed to leave them outside. 
I have never been able to have one set of inter- 



What IS an American 7 

ests to work with and another to play with. 
This is my misfortune but it is true." 

Work to the American is more welcome than 
the flowers in May. Many a man will tell 
you that he has never stopped working long 
enough to consider or to formulate his ideals. 
The American exemplifies Oscar Wilde's epi- 
gram that it's easier to do things than to talk 
about them. The late president of Chicago 
University, Dr. William R. Harper, when dying 
said that he looked forward to the next world as 
a place where he would have more work to 
do. The American plans many times the 
amount of work he can perform and as a conse- 
quence he frequently resembles the old jockey's 
horse — "all action and no go" — but he is seldom 
an idler. Even the rich get nervous prostration 
and the sanitarium habit in their ceaseless 
efforts to spend their money for social better- 
ment and in "uplift" activities. The days are 
not long enough for the American to accompHsh; 
he therefore steams ahead under forced draft, 
and usually at the top notch of his physical 
reserve. His play even takes the form of 
fighting contests, and he has coined the phrase, 
"speeding up," to express the tightening of the 
bands on his machines and the ever-increasing 



8 American Ideals 

pressure upon his workmen to keep pace with 
his engines. The significance of Hfe to him is 
doing something and doing it strong. He is 
explosive often, staccato and shrill of speech, 
since his pace is too fast to cultivate the low 
notes. His tones are consistent with the crash- 
ing noise of industrial and commercial and city- 
filled battle that is music in his ears. To live 
*'Diogenically" would be a sheep's paradise, 
and idle leisure is flat degeneration. In America 
the non-producer and the idler are brotherly 
terms, and both are far more damning epithets 
than the sobriquet, "beachcomber," to the 
colonizing Britisher. Action with enthusiasm 
is a biological necessity in this land, and the 
typical denizen of these United States (as Euro- 
peans say we like to call our country) possesses 
rather generally what Wordsworth called : "The 
self-applauding sincerity of a heated mind." 

It is because of this active, intense, and closely 
concentrated note to which the American 
pitches his song, that he becomes vulnerable to 
the charge of provinciaHsm and a bored specta- 
tor of the historic and the far-away. The man 
whose slogan is to "act, act in the living pres- 
ent," cannot be expected to linger long over 
such headlines as the "Ruins of Timgad," or 



What is an American 9 

the "Memoirs of Potiphar"; these belong to the 
Past, and he is distinctly a disciple of the Pres- 
ent. Was it not Dr. OHver Wendell Holmes 
who said that "an American finds it as hard to 
call back anything over two or three centuries 
old as a sucking pump to draw up water from 
the depth of over 33 feet and a fraction!" 

The point not to be overlooked is that the 
man who will look blank at the suggestion of 
neo-Platonism, and wake up when you begin 
to talk about building a fifty-story skyscraper 
in nine months, has a marvellous capacity 
and a striking avidity for present-day motivity. 
One would not think of characterizing the 
American as Carlyle pictured Novalis — "he 
sits" — but rather in that more moving phrase 
in which the Scotch apostle of action once 
wrote to his friend, Henry Inglis: "DiHgence, 
unwearied, steadfast Endeavor: Kke the stars 
unhasting, unresting! This is the sceptre with 
which man rules his Destiny; and though 
fragile as a reed, removes mountains, spiritual 
as well as physical." Into every exertion and 
essay, into every discussion and every dream, 
the American presses this inherent active im- 
pulse; without it he would be a simulacrum 
merely of his national or his racial type. It is at 



lo American Ideals 

times his weakness; it is more often a magic 
key unlocking for him every storehouse of 
power and opening doors of deliverance from 
every dilemma. 

Closely mixed with the active currents of his 
blood is the American's penchant for saving 
time. It is almost a mania in this country 
where specialists for organizing and eliminating 
and systematizing have created in these latter 
days a full-grown profession — Efficiency Engi- 
neering, a new vocation of timesaving, a brand- 
new germ working as methodically and fatally 
as natural law against the national octopus of 
waste and extravagance. The idea is popular 
since it fits the nature of a people who are 
always striving to get ahead, even ahead of 
themselves. In a world eminent for its before- 
handedness and anticipation, where the people 
read the evening edition of their newspapers at 
noon, where the Saturday Evening Post is issued 
on the previous Wednesday, where the Sep- 
tember numbers of the monthly magazines ap- 
pear early in August, the lines of Seneca are 
appropriate: 

Who murders Time, 
He crushes in the bud a power ethereal, 
Only not adored. 



What Is an American ii 

The American free translation of these Hnes 
reads somewhat more practically than the Ro- 
man original in Benjamin Franklin's working 
room: "Lose no time; be always employed 
in something useful; cut off all unnecessary 
actions." 

The "Yankee notions" of our father's days 
were in the majority of cases time or material 
saving notions. The inventions of the Yankee 
sons have enlarged these ideals of time pres- 
ervation until now we sow and reap and gather 
into barns at the tune of timesaving machinery; 
we print, we sew, we wash our clothes, we write 
our letters, we clean our cotton, we Hght our 
homes, we talk to our distant friends, we anni- 
hilate space in our subways and on our Hmited 
trains, all by timesavers made in America. We 
have carried our individuality in these inven- 
tions around the world. Not long since I re- 
ceived a letter from a Bedouin chief from the 
edge of the Lybian desert asking me to buy and 
send to him five hundred tons of coal for use in 
his American-made steam machinery now em- 
ployed on thousands of acreage in the Fayoum 
district of the Nile country. With my own 
eyes I have seen our country's steam plows and 
threshers and familiar American harvesters 



12 American Ideals 

not only in the valleys of the Upper Nile, but 
in the millet fields of India and in the distant 
islands of the Southern Seas. Any traveller, 
indeed, can feel the touch of home in the Orient, 
with the buzz of the Singer sewing machine 
in his ears — always a wonder of time-preserving 
Yankee genius, as omnipresent in these antip- 
odal lands as is the typewriter, the telephone, 
the cotton gin, and the Edison incandescent 
lights. 

This almost affectionate regard for time, while 
it may be a secondary aim, is linked intimately 
with his work and the things he most earnestly 
desires. The business man wants more time to 
do business, but he also wishes his saved time 
to spend on the particular occupations at home 
or abroad that are nearest his heart. The 
American is by no means the blind and be- 
nighted hustler he is so frequently painted by 
the transient stranger; he has as a rule a method 
in the madness of his plunging, importunate life. 
He works on the very sensible principle that if 
a man is ever to get any time for himself, or his 
family or friends in the swift competitive strug- 
gle of American modernity, he must move 
quickly and withal save every false motion. 
He is not made up fundamentally on a pattern 



What is an American 13 

so different from that of the rest of the world of 
men. The dimatic conditions and the prod- 
igahty of nature have something to do with his 
ideas and his ideals. He happens to be born 
in that section of the universe where clothes 
are in vogue and where bananas and cocoanuts 
upon which some people subsist grow sparingly. 
He has learned, moreover, that the person who 
is not careful about saving his time is like the 
man who preserves the like attitude to his 
money — he never has any. In other words, he 
is determined, however much he may enjoy his 
work, to get it done and be moving on, and to 
that worthy end he is eager to employ every 
friction-removing and time-husbanding device 
known to the contriving and talented Yankee 
brain. I It is intelligible to the keen observer 
that quality of work and service are sacrificed at 
times on this altar of expedition and dispatch — • 
idols looming large in the American's eyes. 
/ American ideals also gather about big things; 
they flourish in the atmosphere of immensities. 
The man in America has discovered that in this 
Land of Promise it is easier to do the big thing 
than the small thing.\ A business man came 
to me not long ago with the lament that he 
failed in his undertaking because he had at- 



14 American Ideals 

tempted too small a proposition — it only in- 
volved a million dollars — "If I had only made 
it a five-million-dollar scheme," said he rue- 
fully, "I could have reached the attention of the 
big financiers.'* 

America is a quarter section, not a square 
foot country. It is the land of the biggest lakes, 
the longest rivers, the fastest trains, the tallest 
buildings, the land of the huge corporation, and 
the spacious farm, and the prodigious industrial 
enterprise. The inhabitant of this country 
of bigness feels the urge of these immeasur- 
able interests; therefore his fascination for 
large figures and enormous scales of measure- 
ment. He feels that he must keep up to the 
pace of business, or get out of the game, or be 
run over. One advance step necessitates a 
longer stride to follow. He must always have 
his "next." A story is told of an American 
humorist who stammered. He removed from 
Baltimore to New York, where he was asked 
by a friend if he made as many jokes as he used 
to do in Baltimore. 

" M-m-more ! " he replied. " B-b-bigger town !" 
It is not altogether edifying to the foreigner 
to hear the American drifting easily into con- 
versation about his country that produces more 



What is an American 15 

cotton and more corn than all the rest of the 
earth combined, a wheat crop doubling that of 
any other nation, or coal mining a million tons 
yearly in advance of any land under the sun. 
There are occasions when modesty should 
restrain even the arithmetic-loving citizen from 
telHng the Englishman that his country trebles 
the Britisher^s production of steel and iron, or 
confronting the made-in-Germany subject with 
the particularly unpalatable fact that the United 
States doubles the Teuton's output in the same 
commodity; or, for example, when he regales his 
guest from across the seas by telling him of the 
factory that turns out 1,500 locomotives yearly, 
or the Chicago Harvester plant that covers 
nearly a hundred and fifty acres, and employs 
upward of twenty-five thousand workers. Big 
and swift business always fascinates the Amer- 
ican mind. The automobile company at the 
Panama Exposition in San Francisco, assem- 
bhng and putting together an automobile every 
six minutes, never fails of an attentive audience. 
It is small wonder that the bigness obsessed 
Yankee gives the impression of having assimi- 
lated the contents of a world almanac, and one 
understands why as a tourist in other climes 
his questions naturally take the form of ** How 



i6 American Ideals 

big is it? How many? How high? How long? 
How many inhabitants?" or "What did she 
cost?" 

This spirit of bigness is contagious. It gets 
into the blood of the foreigner as truly as it 
intoxicates the native-born American in the 
great machine shops and throbbing mills of the 
Middle West and East, where the whirring of 
the spindle glands, and the grinding of the 
steam shovels, and the rattle of the drills upon 
the skyscrapers, are more enthralling music 
than the pipes of a great organ of a European 
cathedral. There is a sense in the American 
heart of realizing his ideals, and this sense 
makes the dreamer and the worker one. There 
IS so little space between his visions and his 
realities that he rarely gets time to become a 
visionary. As he works in his factory and 
welds iron to iron, there is something in the 
air that tells him that the hammers of other 
tens of thousands like him are ringing on the 
new anvils of his own land, and though the 
thought is inarticulate, it is never quite absent 
from him that the clanging of his machinery is 
heard around the world. The American has 
been called provincial, he is noted for the fact 
that he believes his country can produce and 



What is an American 17 

can do whatever can be produced or accom- 
plished in any land upon the globe. Is he so 
much deluded in his thinking? 

Certainly the nation's wealth recently reported 
by the Bureau of the Census is not intended 
to discourage his quenchless optimism regard- 
ing materialities. These figures show that the 
rate of increase from 1904 to 191 2 reveals the 
fact that in the former year the estimated 
wealth of the country, exclusive of tax-exempted 
real property, was $100,000,000,000, and in 191 2 
this wealth had mounted to $175,000,000,000, 
or an advance of 75 per cent, for eight years, 
an increase at the rate of 95 per cent, in a decade. 
This is a progress of material increase surpassing 
anything heretofore recorded in this country, 
as it distances any like comparison in any nation 
beneath the sun. 

The manufacturer of machinery, as well as 
the worker with tools and implements, finds a 
decided stimulus to speeding up his brain and his 
hand in the realization that the value of manu- 
facturing machinery, tools, and implements, 
increased from two and one half billion dollars 
in 1900 to three and one third billion dollars in 
1904, and to six and one tenth billion dollars 
in 191 2, thus surpassing the rate of increase 



i8 American Ideals 

in real estate or in the value of general 
wealth. The electrical engineer, moreover, and 
every one of his myriad workers, who never 
cease to revere the name of Edison, will tell 
you, with a pride of being a real part of it, that 
the value of telephone systems increased from 
four hundred million dollars in 1900 to a figure far 
above the billion dollar mark in 191 2. The manu- 
facturer or the resident who shows you through 
his electric-light plant will feel something 
not upon the program as he tells you that 
the privately owned central electric-light and 
power stations grew in volume in America be- 
tween the years 1900 and 191 2 from four hun- 
dred million dollars to more than two bilHon, 
representing one of the most striking develop- 
ments in this scientific age. 

Why does this invigorate the American or 
the newly naturalized citizen? It is not simply 
that he may be able to gloat over his less for- 
tunate brothers in other lands, though at times 
he reveals an unchastened eagerness to play 
up his country's material progress. It is be- 
cause he feels that he is an integral part of this 
opportunity, that he can have a share in this 
ever more abundant increase. He realizes, in 
fact, that his share only waits upon his renewed 



What is an American 19 

efforts, his enlarging aim, and his more persist- 
ent patience. He reads the figures of the per 
capita wealth of his country, which amounted in 
1850 to ^308 for each inhabitant, and he com- 
pares this with the fact that in 191 2 this 
per capita wealth rose to ^1,836 for each 
inhabitant, or an increase in the eight years 
from 1904 to 191 2 of nearly 50 per cent., or at 
the rate of about 63 per cent, in a single decade. 
The whole effect upon him is one of stimulation, 
and a sense of being in a country that has 
not stopped, but rather is just crossing the 
threshold into its real maturity; it impresses 
him with the sense of youth and limitless 
resource. It makes him believe not only that 
what man has done he can do, but as he judges 
from the achievements before his eyes, he comes 
to the conclusion that he can do what no man 
has ever done before by reason of the enlarged 
opportunities stretching before him. If he has 
been called a "smiling braggart," it is because 
of his confident belief in seeming impossibilities. 
His visions are of deeds that only the bold can 
conceive. 

He not only sees the future painted in the 
terms of a prosperity whose boundaries have 
not yet been limited, but also in the terms of 



20 American Ideals 

personalities as rich and as miraculous as his 
country's progress. His contemporary Hfe all 
about him "shines in the sudden making of 
splendid names." His association is with men, 
to use Lowell's phrase, with empires in their 
brains, crownless empires of social and indus- 
trial progress. He dares with an abandon that 
includes, not simply the past, but also the co- 
operation of his children and his children's 
children. He is far less the creature of the 
moment than is the Britisher who has sighted 
the limitation of opportunity. He feels the 
mariner's instinct that 

" Leagues beyond these leagues there is more sea.'* 

There must come a time, perforce, when this 
irresistible, youthful confidence in great ma- 
terial achievement will be tempered by closer 
confines. At present, however, the tide is run- 
ning strong out to the sea of unbordered big- 
ness. 

Because of his devotion to big activities and 
innumerable timesaving devices, which may 
be explained by the consideration of his envir- 
oning geography and his success in the scientific 
subjugation of the universe, the American has 



What is an American 21 

been called of all men everywhere the most \ 
thoroughly devoted apostle to the almighty 
dollar. This has been called the "post-card 
view'' of Americans. It is true and it is not i 
true. Taken alone it is like all such statements, 
lacking both background, perspective, and at- 
mosphere. 

To be sure the American likes money, for it 
is the means toward the accomplishment of his 
huge desires. If he is peculiar in this respect 
of wanting money to the Englishman, to the 
Frenchman, to Germans, Egyptians, Japanese, 
and Chinese, it is only because he has outstripped 
certain of these people in the success and 
rapidity with which he has acquired it; and 
also because, possibly, of his habit of not being so 
carefully guarded in the revelation of his ideals 
in this direction. ' As a matter of fact, the eco- 
nomic ideal in some form or other, and for some 
purpose or other, is the underlying aim in every 
nation, unless we have failed to judge rightly 
national tendencies as they exist to-day. The 
"full dinner pail'' may not be a cultural phrase, 
but it is exceedingly elemental in the Hfe of 
nations; as the old Ettrick shepherd, James 
Hogg, once remarked, "I defy the utmost power 
of language to disgust me wi' a gude denner." 



22 American Ideals 

That one nation wants money for military 
and manufacturing purposes, another for com- 
merce, another for artistic or pleasurable 
satisfactions, or still others for making of their 
people a world power, or for the chance to 
worship their ancestors more elaborately, is a 
matter irrelevant to the common initial aim to 
get wealth. Outside of a few ignorant fellaheen 
in the Nile valley and certain East Indian 
ryots who secrete or bury or melt up English 
gold for their wives' ornaments, by reason of the 
long memories of Turkish tax oppression, or the 
natural suspicion of the British Raj whom their 
isolation and their superstition have prevented 
them from understanding, I fail to find many 
hoarders of money for money's sake. To call 
any people on earth a dollar-worshipping nation, 
save as dollars signify opportunity to follow 
their particular ideals, is to bandy words mean- 
inglessly. 

Of no people on earth is the reputation of 
worshipping gold per se further from the fact 
than the Americans. The enormous material 
expansion of the country and the consequent 
amassing of wealth and the free spending of the 
same has thrown out of balance at times the 
proper ratio between wealth and the purposes 



What is an American 23 

for which it has been consciously acquired. 
People at home and abroad have not been slow 
to raise the danger signals, and a sensitive peo- 
ple have occasionally exhibited signs, outward 
chiefly, of disparaging the means by which the 
nation's ideals have been advanced. Mr. Car- 
negie, for example, has talked and written con- 
siderably about the disgrace of dying rich, and 
Mr. Rockefeller has shown his diary of system- 
atic giving for the edification of young men — 
both withal after the event of great riches. As 
a proof of the inconsequence of money, it is 
about as influential in changing private, pubUc, 
or world opinion on these matters as the wide- 
eyed wonder of Great Britain that Germany 
should see the value or necessity of colonies. 

The average American goes on beheving 
that money is power, power to get more money, 
yes, and also power to secure the comforts 
and the necessities of homes and happy fami- 
lies, travel, and enough of leisure to take the 
grind out of work. In America, as throughout 
the world, the economic urge is powerful and 
omnipresent. The citizen sees that the vast 
majority of family troubles trace their begin- 
nings, if the records of the divorce courts are 
dependable, to financial struggles and misunder- 



24 American Ideals 

standings regarding money. He finds himself 
in the relentless grip of the high cost of living 
in the great cities; he feels the necessity, 
never before so obligatory, of sending his 
children to personally supervised private schools 
which will mitigate in some measure the ever- 
decreasing attention he has been able to give 
their moral and social training at home. The 
rapidly expanding interest in art, music, books, 
and country life, is a sword of Damocles over 
his head, whose edge is sharpened by the words, 
**Get money or I fall!" The well-nigh pro- 
hibitory price of eating and feeing in the first- 
class city restaurants in order that dancers 
and fiddlers may live; the price of being sick, 
the fashion of getting well, the support of the 
changing season in clothes, the sovereignty 
of the automobile, and the calamitous fear of 
being written down to American oblivion under 
the title of not "looking prosperous" — these 
with many another reason, as strong and as 
specious, make niggardliness a sin more dif- 
ficult to find in America than cocoanuts in 
Iceland. It is partially, not wholly, for causes 
such as these that the rank and file of Ameri- 
cans, unlike the middle-class Englishman or 
Continentals in their satisfied resignation to 



What is an American 25 

caste or autocratic fixities, feel in their demo- 
cratic training that they have a right to have, 
and indeed must have, everything or nearly 
everything that any one else possesses, thus 
atoning in part for early disadvantages of birth 
and education. In other words, money is the 
hand of America's achievement. It is the 
grade up to her higher mountain. It is not her 
head nor her heart, but it is one of the mighty 
means toward her individual and her national 
strength. Americans are ideaHsts engaged in a 
practical task, and wealth is one of the rungs in 
the ladder by which they mount. At times,look- 
ing at things superficially, it would seem that 
Americans, like Emerson's sea shells washed 
clear of the sea. 

Had left their beauty on the shore 

With the sun and the sand and the wild uproar. 

It may seem a sordid estimation of a nation's 
advance or idealism, and it may bring a patron- 
izing smile to the lips of the cultured Euro- 
pean even to speak of it; that the money ideal 
gives a fresh brace to the American spirit and 
an additional spur to his feet for the road ahead, 
filled for him with ever new and widening vistas 



26 American Ideals 

of accomplishment, personal and national, is 
simply another way of saying that the spirit of 
man has always sought means by which he may 
subdue by his activity and wealth all intractable 
things. 

This is to suggest that beyond the sway of the 
dollar, and only associated with it indirectly, 
as the painter's brush is connected with the 
ideal of the picture in the mind of the artist, 
lies the American's desire for success. This suc- 
cess desire is not measurable in his own mind, 
if it is in the minds of others who know him only 
transiently, with a mere sordid accumulation of 
wealth. Some of the most revered Americans 
were poor men, and among them have been 
the nation's most beloved heroes, presidents, 
generals, educators, physicians, and men of the 
bar. Shortly before his death I met Jacob 
Riis in the Middle West, engaged in a laborious 
lecture tour when his physicians had ordered 
him to his bed. He was working because his 
lifelong efforts of building up a sentiment for 
social betterment of his country's "other half," 
the less privileged half in this world's goods, 
had left him little chance or thought for making 
or saving money. John Muir, who has left a 
rich legacy to his countrymen, like so many 



What is an American 27 

thousands of writers and American idealists, 
was poor. He was a close friend of Mr. E. H. 
Harriman, the multi-millionaire railroad king. 
One day Mr. Muir surprised his wealthy friend 
by saying, "Harriman, you know I am a richer 
man than you are ? " 

!*Yes.?" said Harriman, with a question in his 
tone. "Because," continued Muir, "I have all 
the money I want, and you haven't." 

This was the same Harriman, however, who, 
when he was under fire for certain business 
methods which ceased to be regarded exactly 
legitimate some years since in the United States, 
was asked to give explanation to his detractors. 
He turned in his office chair and swept with his 
hand the railroad maps that covered the walls, 
the maps of the Harriman system, piercing the 
Pvockies and opening the East on a straight 
track to the Golden Gate. "These," said he, 
*'are my explanation!" 

We are all familiar with the spirit of honor 
which made Mr. Samuel Clemens (the man 
whom the nation admires as one of its great 
literary pioneers, and with whom no one con- 
nects money ideals) buckle down to his arduous 
lectures and writing at an age when he might 
have retired gracefully. It was not because 



28 American Ideals 

he wanted money for himself; it was because 
he had assumed the financial liabilities of a 
partner, and without money he could not secure 
that which was dearer to him than gold: the 
reward of his conscience and the respect of 
his countrymen. If we could look behind the 
hard working days of the majority of American 
men, who spare themselves not at all, beating 
their way through many a drudging day and 
working night, we would find at the bottom of 
the cup of sacrificing toil the lees of successful 
ambition in their particular vocation. Money! 
Yes, enough to get on with toward their goal of 
**making good," but the goal is to do something 
worth while doing, worth while looking at and 
talking about. Success is their king of in- 
centive. 

/ Why do our European brothers come to 
America's shores one milHon strong each year.^ 

[It is not simply for the better wage and the 

' higher standard of Hving. 

Why does the German American rush to the 
registrar's office to become a naturalized Amer- 
ican citizen? It is not because he is afraid 
of bullet or shrapnel, but because he does not 
wish to be forced to return to a country that 
crushes his individuality, that makes him a 



What is an American 29 

mere cog in the great machinery of a mon- 
archical government, a government that says: 
"Here are our ideals for you," not '*What are 
your ideals for yourself?" 

He wants to live in this great country of 
opportunity that places no check upon effort 
or achievement, that allows a man to dream 
dreams and see visions which, if worthy of 
realization, may take shape before his very 
eyes. He wants to see his children in a land 
that fosters growth and amidst a people whose 
ideals are unhampered by the customs and tra- 
ditions of dead years. 

The casual observer would say, perhaps 
thoughtlessly, that America's ideals are activ- 
ity, money, and success. But the person who 
looks beneath the surface, who takes time to 
study the American and to search out his inner- 
most motive, will find that money and success 
even, those words so satirically hurled at the 
American as being the summum honum of his 
existence, are but the strong wings upon which 
he mounts to greater heights. The Republic 
itself, with its serried ranges of enlarging pos- 
sibilities for effort and merit, with its ideals of 
equality and equal opportunity for man, woman, 
and child, is the concrete expression of that 



30 American Ideals 

dream of freedom to work that slumbers in every 
man's soul. In this land of democracy the 
American uses his activity, his money, his suc- 
cess, and his power as means to make his dream 
come true. He loves his land because he feels 
that he is a part of it, that he is helping to make 
it. It has given him not only the things for 
which he has striven, the things that eye can 
see and hand can touch, the creature comforts, 
but it has given him also a voice. Other coun- 
tries reward effort with material success, but 
leave the worker dumb, an unexpressed atom in 
the nation's life; but in America the individual 
may speak. He is a vital force in the making 
and the moulding of his country's destiny, j He 
is building a house in which his childrerr and 
his children's children may live in the enjoyment 
of his enterprise and in the opulence of his 
liberty. 

In a sense the American is an arch material- 
ist, but his materialism is like a cloud in a dark 
day behind which the sun of ideahsm is always 
shining. 



CHAPTER II 
UTILITARIAN IDEALISTS 

To me men are what they are, 
They wear no masks with me. 

Richard Monckton Milnes. 



CHAPTER II 

UTILITARIAN IDEALISTS 

"I AM a democrat and a dreamer," were the 
words with which I recently heard one of our 
prominent Americans characterize himself. He 
was the head of a large and influential institu- 
tion closely related to contemporary life, an 
institution in which he had accomplished a 
work of far-reaching value to a great city. His 
whole career had been surrounded and well-nigh 
submerged by a myriad of details worlds re- 
moved from the land of dreams. A casual 
spectator would have called his service tre- 
mendously useful, but far from the realm of the 
ideal. Yet I have reason to believe that this 
man is an ideahst — a utilitarian idealist. 

In a land where the word utility is ubiquitous, 
and in an atmosphere where a dreamer is sup- 
posed to be a visionary, the union of the two 
in one individual would seem at first to be an 
irreconcilable anachronism. I believe, notwith- 
standing, that the ideahsm of the twentieth- 

33 



34 American Ideals 

century American is a very real thing, and that 
it has never been more accurately designated 
than in a phrase written by Prof. John R. 
Commons in an article contributed to the Inter- 
collegiate Magazine in 1909: "Utilitarianism is 
the democracy of idealism." 

It is this inexplicable idealism in the midst of 
the practical, the marriage of the imagination 
with modern applied science, the secularizing 
of the mind and the human spirit, and the bring- 
ing out of dreams into the light of a democratic 
day, that distinguishes present-day America. 
No other country by location or tradition has 
been so conducive to the drawing out of a use- 
ful ideahsm, or to making the mystic and the 
scholar practical and serviceable to the com- 
munity. The vast distribution of wealth, the 
marvels of scientific exploration and industry, 
surpassing the wonders of the Egyptians, the 
strain of the Puritan, all set in an atmosphere of 
democratic obligation and cooperation, have 
furnished an alluring and an enchanting field 
for the development of a quality of idealism 
heretofore uncommon among men. 

This tendency uniting ideals with practice 
and bridging the gulf between dreams and ac- 
tion is seen in a hundred ways, and it is far more 



Utilitarian Idealists 35 

general than is usually appreciated. The word 
spiritual, for example, is rapidly losing its former 
pious significance, and is becoming naturalized 
in the society of other words connected with the 
higher nature of man in his everyday life. 
American reHgion must not simply be good, it 
must be good for something. We are not so 
much inclined to say "The Beautiful and the 
Good," but with Goethe, *'The Beautiful is the 
Good.*' The scientist for a time seemed to 
be getting the best of the humanist and the 
scholar, but there are abundant evidences at 
present of the secularizing of all education and 
attaching the specialist in the theories of eco- 
nomics, poHtics, and social and applied science 
especially, to the chariot wheels of modern 
government, modern business, and modern phi- 
lanthropy. 

indeed the shuttle runs back and forth with 
remarkable swiftness and ease between the real 
and the ideal worlds. Ideals in the loftiest 
reaches of democracy, the purification of polit- 
ical hfe, both in the nation and the municipality, 
are becoming regnant without the reformers 
and the reformed recognizing them as ideals. 
They often masquerade under the guise of 
^*good government." Ideals of regulation in 



36 American Ideals 

business and trade and the inter-relation of vast 
corporate concerns, which were like the political 
party platforms before election, of twenty-five 
years ago (counsels of perfection to be edited but 
not executed), have in these days come so near 
actualization that even the sins of the fathers 
are being visited upon the children of "big 
business." When the laws for correction and 
reform of abuses in trade and organized occu- 
pations do not come fast enough, we form com- 
missions to investigate, and from the inexo- 
rable searchlights of these latter idealizing 
bodies nothing and no one is exempt, from the 
biggest insurance company to the biggest re- 
vivalist, and what the investigators miss in 
details of depravity the newspapers supply. 

These utilitarian ideals are in fact about the 
most common and prominent things amongst us 
at present. As they sweep the ranks of society 
we do not always call them ideals. As a na- 
tion we abhor the trail of Pharisaism and the 
semblance of piety. We idealize our character 
under the head of "standards of conduct," or 
"respectability," but it is fairly safe to say that 
there is no place on God's footstool where 
moral ideals of conduct are more universally 
respected or where the absence of th^ni is more 



Utilitarian Idealists 37 

fatally blighting to reputation or success than 
in the United States. 

Strange as it may seem, it is in the person 
of the American business man, practical, level 
headed, all business, that this current of the 
ideal is clearly, often most clearly, seen. His big- 
heartedness is often in proportion to his blunt 
directness. Get a bit below the surface and 
you will find frequently a nature steeped in 
sentiment. *'We do two things exceedingly 
well," says George Barr McCutcheon, "we 
dream and we perform." At the call of distress, 
either at home or abroad, his purse-strings are 
loosened with a prodigality that marks the 
fanatic. In his business office he may be as 
austere as the statue of Memnon, but in his 
home or in company of his friends he is as full 
of ideaHstic feehng and often of romanticism as 
the East Indian schoolboy. 

The average American man of affairs, as soon 
as he gets past the persiflage of group conversa- 
tion to his heart-to-heart talk with you in quiet, 
will lead you to the Httle holy of hoHes of his own 
personal ideals, to some fine worth-while issue, 
without which, notwithstanding his dollars, his 
buildings, and his automobiles, he would be poor 
indeed^ 



38 American Ideals 

We know of two workers in the commercial 
world who would seem to the chance observer to 
be wrapt up in business, but who spend their 
evenings in a private bookbindery where they 
have gathered some of the fine old manuscripts 
of the literary world, many of them collected 
through repeated trips abroad. In the midst 
of these they spend their evenings, actually 
making with their own hands beautifully em- 
bossed de luxe bindings for their most loved 
authors. Do you think that they will talk to 
you of stocks and bonds, or the price of wheat 
and steel, when they are free to let themselves 
go on their heart's main interest? Not for a 
moment. They only wait to get to the thing 
that has captured their spiritual satisfactions. 
I have seen one of them take with reverent 
hands a volume of Shelley with limp green 
covers which has cost him many months of 
evening toil in the bindery near his home. I 
have seen a light in his eyes that revealed an- 
other man than the one I had known in the 
business office. It was the real man, the man 
of an ideal world, who has been able to erect 
himself above himself and to pour into this thing 
of beauty and imagination the very soul of him, 
longing for expression, and only waiting for the 



Utilitarian Idealists 39 

time when his bread-winning hands could bring 
into existence that in which his spirit delighted. 

Foreign visitors to America never cease to 
admire the vast advertising projects of American 
enterprise, than which nothing more bold and 
inventive is to be found in the country to-day. 
It seems at first a sordid thing for a human 
being to spend his life trying to invent ingenious 
methods for drawing public attention to the 
latest brand of tobacco or to the superior quali- 
ties of a new washing powder. Man seems to 
have been born for greater things, we say. We 
pity his humdrum life, but we have seen only 
one side of it, the utilitarian side. The man is 
only half revealed to us in his business. Follow 
with me one of the successful advertising men 
in New York City to his country home, toward 
which his heart as well as his steps turn at every 
possibility of release from business. 

You enter through gates which are a Japanese 
torii, like those rising phantomlike from the 
waters of the inland sea of Japan, facing the 
sacred island of Miyajima. You follow a wind- 
ing pathway over a graceful bridge, which is a 
faithful copy of the Red Bridge at Nikko. You 
pass ponds filled with the purple blooms of the 
Japanese lotus, from beneath whose spreading 



40 American Ideals 

leaves glimpses are caught of glancing gold fish. 
At your feet spray dashes from the gray rocks in 
the brook as the water goes laughing down to 
the waterfall below, and on the cool night wind 
there is brought to you the faint tinkle of bells, 
swaying in the breeze from the pointed roofs of 
the pagoda seen dimly in the distance, where 
also a miniature Fujiyama looms darkly as a 
background. 

There are gardens filled with azaleas and 
cherry trees, and great branches of lavender 
wisteria hang from latticed arbors. Pine trees 
are sharply silhouetted against the horizon, and 
Japanese maples show the delicate color of their 
leaves in the fading glow of sunset. Here a 
large stone lantern and there a calm bronze 
Buddha speaks of peace. We enter the house 
with its quiet courtyards, its curving roofs, 
its rounded archways, its softly shaded windows, 
and the smell of tea on the cozy brazier greets 
the guest as graciously as does the soft-footed, 
smiling Japanese servant who meets us at the 
door. From the veranda of this house upon 
the hillside one can look over the tiny bridges 
that cross the hurrying streams; he can see 
the faint outline of the great torii, and as he 
watches the man who comes to the stone lantern 



Utilitarian Idealists 41 

to place a light therein, the magic land of Nippon 
seems a vivid dream before his enchanted eyes. 

All that is lacking to make the dream a reality 
are the graceful little women in gray silken 
kimonos with obis of mauve and gold, leading 
tiny children who rival the birds in the colors 
of their plumage, their faces alight with laughter 
as they skip along in their lacquered clogs. 

In the busy advertising offices in New York 
there is little or no suggestion of the imagina- 
tion out of which this shining bit of the Sunrise 
Kingdom has been reproduced; but to those who 
know America and Americans, it is but one of 
those significant hints of future promise and 
capacity which seem to say, "We Americans 
may appear to the casual observer only busi- 
ness men, with the dollar mark on all our activ- 
ities, but that is because you do not know us. 
You have not looked into the soul of America, 
where lies concealed, below the abrupt and 
sometimes crude exterior, the love for beauty 
which only waits to reveal itself! " 

Nor is American idealism always disassociated 
from the setting of utility. Henry Ford, for 
example, has led the automobile makers of his 
country, and in his leadership has made an 
enormous fortune. What does he do? He 



42 American Ideals 

immediately begins to think of ways by which 
he can utilize that fortune in the realm of a 
generous cooperation with his employees. He 
raises the wages of his men to a figure almost 
unheard of, even in a land renowned for the high 
prices paid to skilled labor. He dreams that 
he sees every workman in his employ with a 
home of his own, his own bit of garden, his 
flowers, his children in school instead of in the 
workshop. He makes the worker who was 
only a part of his vast machine shop, a mere cog 
in the wheel, a man. The whole economic 
American world scoflPed at first at the dreams of 
this arch utilitarian idealist, but this same 
world is rather proud of Henry Ford's idealism. 
Its pride exists in the fact that he reveals the 
dream of human betterment hidden in the heart 
of every man.^- 

Another striking example of the American 
utilitarian idealist is aflForded in the career of the 
late John Pierpont Morgan, a king of finance 
and the collector par excellence of the world's 
treasures of art. The two strains of the prac- 
tical and the ideal were woven together so 
closely that even the man who was courted 
alike by the chancelleries of financial Europe 
and the masters of the world's galleries of art 



Utilitarian Idealists 43 

would have found it difficult to disentangle 
them. What crisis of the American common- 
wealths was not alleviated, what panic of 
wealth or of labor was not calmed in the past 
fifty years of our nation's growth, by the strong 
and usually unerring business judgment and 
insight of this man? In many an out-of-the- 
way curio shop in the Orient, and even in the 
quaint little Japanese house on the mountain- 
side where an artist of the old Samurai school 
still carves and paints serenely, I have seen the 
lover of artistry, as a final sign of his discrimina- 
tion, bring reverently out of a safe hiding-place 
some bit of choice engraving or metal work with 
the remark: "I am keeping this for Mr. 
Morgan!'' 

There are perhaps few men of the present 
generation who better illustrate the peculiar 
quality of the ideahsm of America which even 
in business sweeps the field with an accuracy of 
vision that embodies more than intellect, more 
than scientific knowledge, more than reliance 
on tradition, than did this remarkable financier. 
It is a different thing from the German exact- 
ness in the realm of facts; it is also something 
other than the British "muddling through." 
It is nearer what Bergson would call intuition, 



44 American Ideals 

which he claims is the method of the creative 
artist, a greater force than the logic of the mind 
or the blind leadership of instinct. This in- 
tuitiveness of the American is the centre and 
secret of his constructive imagination, it is the 
genius of pressing straight to the crucial issue, 
regardless of the custom of yesterday or the 
abstract thinking of to-day. It is, in the words 
of Stanton Coit, *'the method of the poets." 
It sees with the eyes of the soul as well as with 
the eyes of the mind and the teaching of the 
hand. It is the ardent apostle of present utility, 
all the utility possible, but behind the useful 
there is a fixed star — that star is idealism. It is 
the ideal that makes the real possible, that 
makes it desirable, that gives it reasonableness. 
It is the ideal that keeps the man working, it 
is his star of hope. 

This vision seen in and through his work is 
the only thing that makes the American's 
inveterate toil something else than drudgery. 
Save to the aged clerk with his silver hair, and 
those destined followers in the race of life whose 
duties are the bars of habit, work in America is 
not a "squirrel's wheel." The English Wesley 
once said, "I can plod." The American says, 
**I can plod if I can see something ahead to plod 



Utilitarian Idealists 45 

/or.'' In this country of vast dreams and huge 
fulfilments idleness is a rusty sword in the 
soul, but work that has no point to it turns the 
iron round, and is even more excruciating. 
The resiliency of the American spirit is pro- 
verbial. It is born of hilltop visions of work 
that is profitable to do, endeavor that gets 
one on. Everything must be charged with a 
more or less useful idealism. A business man 
said to a clergyman, who urged him to join his 
church, "If there is anything I can do that will 
really count, I will come in, but I don't want to 
join the church just to sit around and sing." 
The United States is probably the most dis- 
tasteful atmosphere imaginable for the man 
without a "job''; it is also almost a prison house 
to the man who feels that his job is not worth 
while. It is this intuitive sense that he has 
taken hold of a great work that explains much 
of the American's enthusiasm and unquench- 
able buoyancy. Dr. Eliot is reported to have 
said at one time concerning Mr. Roosevelt, that 
he had never "grown up." Is it not, however, in 
his ever-renewed idealism, in the pushing power 
of undisillusioned youth, as mighty as it is at 
times mistaken, in that resistless energy born 
of new and unfulfilled dreams of human prog- 



46 American Ideals 

ress, that our ex-President typifies the Ameri- 
can spirit? Utilitarian idealism is the reign of 
a high ideal in the midst of useful labor. It is 
doing a practical thing with a spiritual motive. 

It is not simply in the realm of public life 
and business that this new type of idealism 
reveals itself; it is clearly seen in modern Ameri- 
can literature. There is a sense in which our 
contemporary writing appears as it did to 
Carlyle in London — "madder than Bedlam." 
In spots it is vapid enough, and if the compari- 
son is with the formal models of certain other 
centuries, judged by those models at least, it 
will be weighed in the balances of style and 
cultural perfection only to be found wanting. 

It is in its departure from the regular English 
types and in its refusal to be standardized ac- 
cording to any traditional copy whatsoever, that 
its distinctive character exists. While no ob- 
serving and thoughtful person would presume 
to take the ring for a considerable mass of our 
present-day writing, in fiction especially, a 
literature as devoid of any high ideals as it is 
raw and specious and unwholesome, a kind of 
sophisticated small talk that arouses on the 
printed page the same unspeakable weariness 
that it does on the street or in the club; yet it is 



Utilitarian Idealists 47 

manifestly unjust to fob off a nation's litera- 
ture with a pedantic wave of the hand because 
it has its stupid moments. This particular 
type of quackery in letters has received its 
meed of attention at the hands of Mr. Owen 
Wister and many another, and usually with 
quite sufficient vitriol mixed with the treatment. 
I do not recall any literary criticism of the kind 
of books that are cheap at whatever price or in 
whatever best-selling quantities that has so 
completely met the situation without waste of 
words as the "recommendation" for a superficial 
book given to an agent by Abraham Lincoln. 
After Lincoln had politely refused to buy the 
book, being pressed for a testimonial, he wrote 
the following: "Any one who likes this kind of 
a book, this is the kind of book he would like." 

The consideration of our literature, as it grows 
naturally out of our civilization in the United 
States, is equally certain to be disappointing if 
we begin with its ostensibly false alarm lit- 
erature, as it is if we look to find in it six- 
teenth-century figures and stilted utterances of 
Venetian ladies dressed in silks and panniers and 
moving in graceful minuets. 

On the other hand, we can look at our books 
and writing as belonging peculiarly to new, to 



48 American Ideals 

growing and unfinished institutions of a nation 
of utilitarian idealists, a nation where canonical 
writing is no passport to success simply because 
it is in regulated symmetry to another century. 
We can see the present literature, like many an- 
other thing American, sailing more or less in a 
chartless sea, where the only landmark is the 
real contemporary life all about us; with such 
point of view, certain things become clear as 
daylight. 

From such vantage point we see American 
writing struggling consciously, or often with an 
intuitive unawareness, to embody vitally the 
truth and the insistent sense of reality of our 
twentieth-century life. It reveals, even in its 
lower levels, the new sense of social responsibil- 
ity and also the growing psychical sensibility 
of the people. Even Winston Churchill, one of 
our modern standard fictionists, has abandoned 
in his last two novels much of his art, or what 
we have usually considered to be the grooves 
of the uniform traditional plot, to go reforming 
in religion and pubhc morals. The books of 
Mark Twain, which, as he said when he was 
alive, sold right along with the Bible, are 
continuing to do so in ever-renewed editions. 
If there was ever an American writer who 



Utilitarian Idealists 49 

dressed his ideas in human dress, slashing right 
and left at every phantom of unreality, laughing 
with himself and at himself on one page and 
pointing his moral on the next, if we ever had 
an author who lighted his torch of idealism 
at the glowing vital flame of moving vibrant 
democracy as we know it and feel it all about 
us, it was the beloved Clemens. With the 
semblance of Carlyle, but with the lighter 
smiling American touch and with a "genial 
precipitation,'' his cry was: "Down with hollow 
conventions! Down with historic feudalism 
which no longer concerns us! Down with medi- 
eval, aristocratic airs! Up with the ideals that 
lie real and naked at the heart of Hfe! Up with 
the human ! Up with the natural ! Up with the 
ideaUsm of Reality!" Samuel Clemens was 
our first great utilitarian idealist in literature. 
Many have since followed in his train, none of 
them, in the field of story writing, more closely 
his disciple probably than was O. Henry, who, 
like Charles Dickens, wandered about the city 
streets to find his characters, painting them in 
their working clothes. He appealed at once to 
the humor and the good-natured disapprobation 
of his countrymen for the "society" folk, be- 
cause their activities were so funny in their 



50 American Ideals 

uselessness. When at one time, O. Henry, 
describing the society aspirants as occupying 
the front seats in the theatre, said, "They were 
bathed in tears and they were dressed for it," 
he showed his shining lance of humor, but the 
hand on the blade was subtle as it was silken 
in its thrust at the masquerade. 

In the poetry as in the prose of our contem- 
porary writers this urgent democratic realism 
can be traced. Nicholas Vachel Lindsay, son 
of a country doctor in Springfield, Illinois, in a 
fine democratic voice cries that poetry is not to 
live cloistered and on the hilltops, but to come 
down and rejoice the hearts of common men. 
With the hard-handed simpHcity of the Middle 
West, Mr. Lindsay joins a delicacy and an 
elfin, whimsical humor that takes us by sur- 
prise. His "Adventures While Preaching the 
Gospel of Beauty" rediscovers the capacity of 
the American villager for enjoying beauty and 
his willingness to accept its sway. Beauty 
resides by every man's door-sill and hearth- 
stone, says Lindsay. Springfield, Illinois, is as 
lovely to him as Oxford or Athens. The cynic 
may ask whether this homely beauty lover has 
been to Oxford or Athens; but whether or not, 
his message is none the less valuable and in- 



Utilitarian Idealists 51 

tended to stir the heart of the American. As 
Stevenson says, "the true materiaHsm is to be 
ashamed of what we are." He has what Joyce 
Kilmer, another type of modern and effective 
everyday poet, calls ** literary colloquialism," 
and these men belong to the soil. They bring 
home the muse to our business and to our 
bosoms. The fervor of their democratic vision 
is all to the good. 

When Lindsay pictures heaven with the court- 
house square of his favorite Illinois towns, he 
speaks with the voice of the true poet, as does 
Kilmer when he carries us on the midnight train 
to the suburbs of New Jersey. 

Another Illinois man, Edgar Lee Masters, 
writes the "Spoon River Anthology," in which 
a village cemetery becomes vocal. The joys 
(a few) and the sins and degradations (a great 
many) of Spoon River are detailed with re- 
lentless truth by these voices from undersod — a 
kind of post-mortem on a whole community. 
The appeal to the burlesque sense is vivid; and 
yet some of the little sketches (e. g., that of 
Anne Rutledge, Lincoln's dead sweetheart) 
are full of beautiful reality. 

Then there are the writers of "free verse" — 
the vers librists and the imagists who contend 



52 American Ideals 

that their work obeys subtler laws of rhythm 
and measure, and is in no wise "free/' In all 
these productions the stuff of poetry is present — 
the picture, the emotion, the atmosphere — vivid 
and startling. But it is freakish and often un- 
digested, lacking the musical and metrical 
polish which still constitutes the externals of 
poetry to the vast majority of us. These 
ingenuous and colorful eccentricities are a part 
of our new tendency though they have not 
captured the approbation of our sober critics. 

The truer spoor of our present-day literature 
lies more closely along the trail of such men as 
Edwin Markham and Robert Frost in poetry; 
or Booth Tarkington and Walter Prichard 
Eaton in fiction and essay. Many names could 
be enumerated to show that our literary earnest- 
ness is growing more and more tinged with 
sparkle and play of imagination. Our litera- 
ture to-day reveals, if not all the substance of 
things hoped for, at any rate the evidence of 
many things not seen. The excellence of our 
oldest and most dignified magazines and the 
fine work they have accomplished in moulding 
and fixing our democratic hterary ambitions 
and ideals, can hardly be praised highly enough. 

Henry Mills Alden, whose lifetime of service 



Utilitarian Idealists 53 

as editor of Harper* s Magazine lifts him above 
the possibility of the charge of ultra-radical 
opinion, has characterized our modern litera- 
ture as "vital altruism," and expressive of the 
sense of the universal kinship with life, as the 
ground of the deepest creative charm. **The 
general tendency of the fiction of our day," 
writes Mr. Alden, "on whatever level it may 
reach the popular mind, is toward reahty. The 
general intelligence is ever more and more 
responsive to the catholic and sympathetic 
note of that advanced criticism which, while it 
accepts all of humanity in its real significance — • 
the past as well as the present — yet resolutely 
repudiates all formal judgments and set canons 
or the regulation of life and art, and all prej- 
udices and fixed notions which rest upon tradi- 
tion or upon our own loose thinking," 

In other words, we have a new literature in 
America because we have a new humanity. 
This literature accepts life on its own terms and 
is not perturbed with the erudite interests of 
philosophy, history, or treatments upon abstruse 
phenomena. It is the note of the plain and 
common Hfe, full of homeliness, which has 
mastered our modern type of writing and given 
it realistic ideals. 



54 American Ideals 

This attempt at the disclosure of life as it is 
in its naked contemporaneousness, is not un- 
worthy of literary workmanship. It is superior 
to mere imitation of models that fitted another 
age, and it is quite as likely to be filled with 
the warmth and the color of that humanity for 
which it paints. Even Stevenson, with his 
unwearied attempts at a style that was more or 
less an imitation of a period that was dying, 
is explained by a discerning critic as having 
his vogue not so much by the form of his writ- 
ing as through the matchless charm of his 
personality and especially his letters, which 
reveal without the screen of literary artisanship 
the heart and soul of the man. 

When we examine the books that succeed 
as "best sellers" (which it is said the women of 
America, who only have sufficient time to read 
novels, peruse and talk about to their husbands), 
the popular trend is revealed even in the midst 
of much that is scarcely worthy of the name of 
literature. These books, without pretence and 
frequently without the ability to express in 
clear phrase or in what Matthew Arnold called 
"the whole tissue" of their work the ideas that 
are tumbling over themselves in the minds of the 
alert and inventive writers, do not aim to keep 



Utilitarian Idealists 55 

above the world, but to get down to the world, 
into the very thick of life. Their frequently 
simple love tales or narrations of melodramatic 
adventures reflect the most ordinary details and 
happenings of daily life as it is known to the 
masses. They are almost invariably filled 
with optimism and happy endings, knowing 
that the American will not endure being tor- 
tured to no purpose. There is hardly a touch 
of the historic as it abounded in Scott, who at 
one time swept so strongly the popular mind, 
especially in the South. The length of Fielding 
and Jane Austin is tabooed as surely as are their 
intricate and complicated plots and character 
analysis. To be sure we have had an attempt 
in recent years to foist upon the public the 
sordid discussion of the sex question in many of 
its varied phases. Sometimes there has been 
the avowed attempt to teach high morality 
through the nauseating depiction of immorality; 
sometimes there has been a malignant turn, 
with scathing and often unsupportable allega- 
tion concerning modern abuses and corporate 
enterprises. These have marked only a transi- 
tional phase in the swing away from the con- 
ventional writing of the last generation to the 
more direct and moving contemporary style of 



56 American Ideals 

the present. It has already become unpopular 
as the issues which the reforming writers bom- 
barded have received attention at the hands of 
public opinion and the nation's laws. 

Although this new type of literature is only 
in its springtime in America, the modern es- 
sayists have caught its spirit and the power 
of its utilitarian and reahstic ideal. This es- 
sayist type is as different from the Emersonian 
or classic as one can well imagine. It is less 
formal, more intimate, neighborly, and it talks 
as folks talk. It does not disregard col- 
loquial expressions that convey sometimes fuller 
and quicker meaning than pages of round- 
about argument. The writers of these essays, 
as well as the authors of the descriptive and 
factual articles in the magazines, do not make 
one feel that they are looking at the procession 
as it goes by and writing about it, but that they 
are parts of the throng itself, caught in all its 
multifold implications, and inviting one to join 
them in the ranks. The very titles of some of 
these essay books reveal the modern drift — 
'Trowds," "What Men Live By," "The Joyful 
Road," "Personal Efficiency" — all reflecting 
the fact that through the many channels of 
literary culture the American people are par- 



Utilitarian Idealists 57 

ticularly interested in the avenue through 
which they may reach a clearer idea of the 
development of the individual in the world of 
to-day. It is by no means a discouraging fact 
in this connection to read in a recent report of the 
New York Public Library that 9,516,482 books 
were taken out for reading in the past twelve 
months, and 1,267,879 readers were served in 
the adult reading-rooms. 

The alert and rapid life of the country is a 
reason behind these new demands upon its 
modern literature. It is the age of the "mo- 
vies,'' the era of the "punch/* 

These rapid days call for the complete novel 
in one serial issue of the monthly magazine. 
One magazine publisher is quoted as saying: 
"Any story that is worth printing can be told 
in three thousand words." A weekly which 
claims a circulation of 1,750,000 copies holds 
before itself as a chief aim the reflection of all 
things human, in the most concrete, definite 
tales, never allowing the writer to lose the 
objective thing in his individual subjective 
consciousness; it tries to place its weekly speech 
before the pubUc in language that the average 
person uses himself and can readily understand 
without undue meditation. The dusty com- 



58 American Ideals 

placency of the classics and what is known as 
the "high-brow" type of Hterature seems to be 
lacking in the terse and moving qualities de- 
manded in these swift, accomphshing, utilitarian 
days. 

The American's passion for sensational news 
is a part of this realistic desire for humanness. 
He likes to read of people accomplishing great 
contemporary achievements, of Goethals build- 
ing the Panama Canal, of Orville Wright with 
his aeroplanes, and McAdoo with his subways. 
Pictures and biographical sketches of men and 
women who are doing things fill the pages of 
magazines and Sunday supplements. Like the 
Oriental, the American carries away his truth 
in a figure or in an anecdote more readily than 
in a principle. President Woodrow Wilson, 
when a college professor, said that the boys of 
Princeton remembered his stories and forgot his 
lectures. Indeed, from one point of vision, 
the new Hterature seems Hke a kind of sub- 
limated journalism, with a vitality of motive 
and sympathy and spontaneous communication 
all its own. If it lacks great scope, historical 
reserve, and universality of knowledge, it does 
not lack those dynamic forces that are every- 
where in the air of contemporary endeavor. 



Utilitarian Idealists 59 

To the average reader at least this kind of litera- 
ture seems more desirable than anaemic memoirs 
and false chivalries that neither "sting men into 
action nor goad them to the heights of noble 
passion." 

The literature of the present must be con- 
ducive of quick and real and dramatic effect, 
of humor that is spontaneous and unstudied. 
The American wants his books like his religion, 
unobstructed by the mock heroic or the mock 
sublime. He finds his "garden of humanity" 
in the careers and relationships of the plain 
people, with problems similar to his own, whose 
lives frequently are as human, frail, and full of 
longing as they are genuine and transparent. 

It is this reflection of human beings, human 
action^ and human feeling that forms the true 
background for spiritual freedom, for the ideal- 
ism of reaHsm, and useful objective, which 
pervades the literature of the American's present 
day. If his poetry has taken the form of im- 
aginative prose, it is because this form is more 
readily adjustable to the ever-changing moods 
and tempers of his everyday life. He who 
would be great in our contemporary letters 
must be near enough to life to feel its natural 
pulse beat and the breath of its moving spirit. 



6o American Ideals 

He must not live in a world apart. He must be 
an idealist, but always an idealist in a real 
world. 

Another characteristic of this idealism, re- 
vealed not only in literature but through every 
vein of the nation's life, is the American's un- 
failing sense of humor — the kind of humor that 
Mr. Alden calls "the most distinctive quality 
of life — the index of its flexibility, of its tender- 
ness, mercy, and forgiveness." 

The Americans are reputed to be the most 
humorous people in the world. Tbeir humor 
rises out of the very intensity of the native 
mind, and is made wide and free and cosmopoli- 
tan by the constant accessions to the popula- 
tion from many diverse lands. It sprays bits 
of sunshine across the darkest channels in the 
life of the nation and the individual. Humor in 
the United States is another term for that easy- 
going good-nature and geniality which covers, 
surrounds, and pervades the entire world of work 
and play, and takes the lines out of the serious- 
ness and rigidness of its incessant activity. The 
type of humor is big like the western moun- 
tains, and as liberty loving and free as the 
western plains. 

The very size of the country seems to make 



Utilitarian Idealists 6i 

expansive the native intellect and lead it into 
that comical exaggeration which is one of 
the essential features of our broad and not too 
subtle humor. The universality of this laugh- 
ing sense is always remarked by foreigners. 
It is found everywhere, in the cabin as in the 
palace, and the man who has a sense of humor 
is always an acceptable companion. Many 
a man has become famous and beloved in 
America from no other reason than that he 
made people laugh. The names of Artemus 
Ward, Bret Harte, Bill Nye, Nast, Mark Twain, 
and "Josh Billings," are household words, while 
the present generation is as familiar with Peter 
Dunne and his Mr. Dooley as with David 
Harum, and with Bunny of the movies, and 
a host of comic cartoon heroes of the newspapers. 
It is the kindliness of the nation's humor that 
is perhaps most striking. It is not what Alfonse 
Karr defined as "reason armed," the kind that 
raises a laugh but leaves a sting behind it; it is 
more usually the variety that does not wound, 
but rather sees the incongruous in one's self 
and in others, and is as genial and good-tempered 
as the native heart. Indeed, it is not altogether 
separated from the tearful emotion, and often 
reminds us of Byron's definition of humor, "a 



62 American Ideals 

pendulum betwixt a smile and a tear." It is 
used alike by the serious and the frivolous. 
Those who used to sit under the evangelism of 
D. L. Moody recall the way in which they were 
convulsed with laughter in one moment, and 
the next would feel on their cheek something 
suspiciously like a tear. Carlyle once said that 
the essence of humor was sensibility, warm, 
tender, fellow feeling with all forms of existence. 
This fits the American variety. 

One does not look for a humor that could be 
defined exactly as wit, unless it happens to be 
exhibited through the Irish-American stock with 
which we are graciously blessed. It may not 
reach the highest grades of humor, "^wisdom at 
play," which is often labored and creaking in the 
wheels. The variety found in Hosea Bigelow, 
the Knickerbocker History of New York, the 
stories, the essays, and trenchant criticisms of 
Messrs. Clemens, Lowell, and Holmes, flows 
spontaneously from a good sound heart as free 
and unrestrained as nature herself. 

The entire literature of the United States is 
pervaded with this humorous atmosphere, not 
in epigrams simply, or in terse, easily quoted 
paragraphs; it is in the whole tissue, and seen 
no more generally in the older essay writers than 



Utilitarian Idealists 63 

in the newer schools represented by Howells, 
Crothers, Van Dyke, Agnes Repplier, and Simeon 
Strunsky. The attempt to exhibit it to stran- 
gers would be difficult and not unlike the effort 
of the old philosopher who carried about with 
him a brick as a specimen of the house he wished 
to sell. American humor has saved many an 
insipid novel from death at birth. It has made 
much ordinary writing palatable by its accept- 
able condiment, while the labored and frequently 
incongruous humor of more sedate writers, the 
kind that ^^smells of the lamp," is for that very 
reason too cumbrous and forced, and fails to 
carry the crowd with it. 

This penchant for humor has been largely 
responsible for the after-dinner speech in which 
the Yankee is renowned the world over. There 
are usually a full score of men in the country, 
types suggested by Messrs. Choate and Depew, 
whose presence always assures a successful 
public dinner. To the American, as Charles 
Lamb once said, "jokes come in with the can- 
dle," and you can easily get attendance at a 
dinner when a good list of humorous after-din- 
ner speeches is announced. In spite of the fact, 
as Wendell Phillips once declared, that there 
were never more than twenty-five original good 



64 American Ideals 

stones, the American shows marvellous ingenu- 
ity in the elaboration of this original supply, 
and when these give out, he tells stories on 
himself, and on the toast master, and on his 
mother-in-law, which subjects are always sure 
to make a hit in risibilities. 

Much of the humor clusters about the big- 
ness of the land and the native satisfaction in it, 
and in essence it turns upon the idea of reality 
and utility quite as much as does the modern 
literature. 

I was riding some years since from Long 
Beach to Los Angeles, when about midway I 
discovered a new schoolhouse, which was be- 
ing built, quite by itself, in a big unoccupied 
field, at least a mile from any dwelling. I asked 
the native driver why they built that school- 
house so far away from town, at which the man 
replied, "Well, you see, the last time we built a 
schoolhouse, we put it on the edge of the settle- 
ment, and before we got it done the town had 
grown up to it and passed it. This time we 
wanted to be sure to keep ahead of the town for a 
year at least." 

The story of the old Maine farmer, told by 
his fellow townsmen, is indicative of the humor 
aroused in an active people by the unique and 



Utilitarian Idealists 65 

useless specimen of humanity who does not 
work. The old countryman who spent his 
time around the stove in the grocery store was 
asked his occupation, he replied: "I jest set and 
think — and sometimes I jest set." 

The humor of ancestral glory is brought out 
and laughed over in such stories as that of the 
old American family, one of whose progenitors 
is represented in a picture portrayed as going 
into Noah's ark with the archives of his famous 
house under his arm. The pride of family is a 
never-failing source of amusement to the Amer- 
ican whose dreams are always in front of him 
rather than behind him, and who fastens his 
aspirations to the achievements he himself ex- 
pects to accomplish in the future, rather than 
to the things his ancestors may have done in the 
past. 

Exaggeration in extremis is also generally 
popular in American humor. It is another 
indication of the excessive ambition of the peo- 
ple toward magnitude. Baron Munchausen 
would have been most acceptable in America. 
A man whose imagination can carry him far 
enough in humorous unveracity of the type 
displayed by Mark Twain in many of his west- 
ern stories, is always a captivating entertainer. 



66 American Ideals 

In spite of the fact that the American pos- 
sesses serious ideals and has the moral strain 
only a bit below the surface, he is the last man 
to take himself seriously or to allow his fellows 
to become over-serious or dogmatic. It is one 
of the saving traits in this country that the 
entire nation laughs easily and must of neces- 
sity see the small and funny things in the most 
unforeseen places, mixing gayety with almost 
every phase of its complex life. 

The nation's humor at times goes much 
farther than its creator intended, and becomes 
a means of caricaturing in a somewhat dispro- 
portionate way the object of its fun; examples 
in point being the nation-wide quips at Mr. 
Bryan and Josephus Daniels for their grape- 
juice theories, and the nation's laugh, so difficult 
to be forgotten, connected with a comparatively 
trivial incident of a few over-exuberant women 
showering their kisses upon a national hero. 
Mr. Bryan's peace efforts are pictured humor- 
ously by a cartoonist, who draws the ex- 
Secretary of State with a number of dove's eggs 
resting in the curls of his hair — while the dove 
disports herself in the background. 

American humor is closely associated with 
American idealism through its intuition, its spon- 



Utilitarian Idealists d^j 

taneity, and its indispensable service. It brings 
back the nervous intense native temperament 
into correct focus. As his activity in gigantic 
machinations reveals his intellect, as his material 
successes reveal his power of organization, and 
his books reveal his desire for reahty, the 
American's humor uncovers his heart, making 
the nation one in a common humanity, knitting 
it together in a kinship of good feeHng, and keep- 
ing alive the sense of good will. 



CHAPTER III 
THE SQUARE DEAL— BOTH WAYS 

They at least believed in the words which made 
the Declaration immortal: "All men are created 
equal." I am glad to remember, too, that Lincoln, 
not many days before he went to join the august 
assembly of just men made perfect, said to me, **A 
man who denies to other men equahty of rights is 
hardly worthy of freedom; but I would give even 
to him all the rights which I claim for myself." 

John Hay. 



CHAPTER III 

THE SQUARE DEAL— BOTH WAYS 

"The leading business ideal?" The manu- 
facturer slowly repeated my question after me. 
He had just returned from a month of travel 
among the branches of the firm in the Middle 
West, and it seemed an opportune time to get 
from him a comprehensive answer. He placed 
his cigar on the corner of his desk and his eye 
followed down the lofty corridor of skyscrapers 
that darkened William Street. "In a word, I 
should say, the square deal — both ways.** 

This man who answered my question was 
not an apostle of "big business," he was not a 
socialist, he was not a dreamer. He was a 
typical business man of moderate means and 
perhaps somewhat more than the average 
thoughtfulness. He was of native stock, with- 
out hyphen in his name or his nature, a self- 
respecting citizen and householder. He was the 
kind of man who helps to form the great national 
vertebrae of the United States. 

71 



72 American Ideals 

Was this popular statement of democracy 
something the man had inherited? Was it a 
part of that more or less loosely arranged senti- 
ment of equality that floats all too frequently 
in the atmosphere of the country? What was 
behind the statement? What did he mean by 
**the square deal?" 

The gentlemen of eminence who in the eigh- 
teenth century placed their signatures to that 
formidable American document which declares 
that God has created all men equal, and has 
also endowed them with certain inalienable 
rights, such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of 
happiness, were not thereby writing history, 
but rather trying to designate the ideals that 
were and would be of the new Republic. Some 
of these men were slave owners, some were 
men of high birth and gentlemanly breeding, 
whose financial status was in no sense on a par 
with the estate of those whom their weighty 
legislations were to rule. They were not think- 
ing just then of making over their chattels into 
free men, neither were they consciously intend- 
ing to divide their capital with the less indus- 
trious or less favored early colonists. They 
were not meditating, we believe, merely the 
erection of a wall of defence against the prac- 



The Square Deal — Both Ways 73 

tical doctrines of traditional English superiority 
and the Divine right of kings, current in their 
English motherland. This latter object un- 
doubtedly had considerable weight in both the 
spirit and the letter of that document created 
by the members of this first National Congress, 
our hereditary political doctrinaires; but there 
was something else deeper and more essentially 
vital in the minds of these forefathers. 

The Constitution which was then born was 
the herald of a new ideal, freshly, daringly, 
racily seized and embodied; and this ideal was 
rooted and had already grown in the soil of 
religious conviction, which is by far the most 
desperately tenacious rootage from which the 
ideas of men may spring. It was the sentiment 
of the square deal intuitively grasped by men 
who had never dreamed of an industrial civili- 
zation that invented the popular term. It was 
the fair play and equality sentiment which is 
American through and through. 

There are those among our eminent jurists 
of the present day whose first-hand experiences 
with the inequalities of the law have seemed at 
times to disillusion them as to the consistency 
of these sentiments with the conditions and 
practices of our twentieth-century life. One of 



74 American Ideals 

our distinguished lawyers has characterized 
the Constitution as a collection of "literary 
generahties," while not a few have heard with- 
out unfavorable comment the stock remark 
that England is more democratic than America, 
attributing to this statement the meaning that 
whatever may have been the case one hundred 
years ago, we are now deluding ourselves with 
aims and dreams and paper sanctions that have 
no corresponding realities in modern affairs. 
In other words, we have lost the trail leading 
back to these early ideals of real equality and 
freedom for all men, and the sooner we dispense 
with the simulacrum of our alleged freedom 
as exemplified in this eighteenth-century polit- 
ical instrument, the better for our good sense 
and sincerity. 

Racial ideals, however, are like the impressions 
of childhood, indelible, and inclined to become 
more vivid as we get farther along the road, and 
feel and see them from the hilltop of life's 
maturer trials and experiences. The modern 
Grecian women of true Hellenic extraction still 
break their urns before their doors at a Greek 
funeral, even as in those distant days when 
Athens sat serene and queenly upon the throne 
of the world. The young westernized Chinese, 



The Square Deal — Both Ways 75 

in their Occidental bowlers and frock coats, 
still return in April to their parental roof tree 
to do honor to their ancestors, as their fathers 
did six thousand years before them; while the 
native Hindu, modern member of the Viceroy's 
Council in India, passes from his Europeanized 
law chamber at Delhi with traditional ease to 
the banks of the sacred Mother Ganges, in 
whose healing flood through years and count- 
less eras his Hindu sires have sought to lave 
away their earthly pollution. 

Likewise in America, while we have changed 
marvellously in many ways, and have grown to 
maturity since the give-me-liberty-or-give-me- 
death cry of our forefathers rang through the 
thirteen sparsely settled states, there is a kind 
of "old home week" feehng that shivers up and 
down the Yankee's spine when these pristine 
"glittering generalities" of "freedom and equal 
rights'* are reexpressed in various modern 
synonyms like "the square deal," or the "new 
freedom," or " the rights of the foreigner." Even 
"women's rights" and "votes for women" do not 
stagger the American imagination as they seem 
to paralyze the British soul. "Rights" at- 
tached to anything or anybody is not a word 
to frighten the inhabitants of the United States. 



76 American Ideals 

There is, moreover, a firm belief that will not 
down that these early catchwords of our eman- 
cipated North American Commonwealth, writ- 
ten literally in letters of blood on the morning 
sky of our early revolutionary day, are still 
shining, and indeed have always been shining 
through these one hundred and thirty-nine 
years; and if at times obscured by clouds as 
thick as they were frightful, there are those who 
contend that it has needed only the bursting of 
the storm or a blaze of sun to bring back these 
letters into fresh and clear vision. The very 
persistency of the term democracy induces one 
to believe that despite its many faults and 
weaknesses it is still a factor to be conjured 
with in the United States. 

Dr. H. L. Hastings, in his lectures against 
Robert Ingersoll, used to begin somewhat as 
follows: "Mr. Ingersoll has talked and written 
considerably about *The Mistakes of Moses.' 
He has said so much about these mistakes that 
we have come to believe that a man whose 
mistakes men are thinking and talking about at 
least four thousand years after his death, must 
have been considerable of a man." With 
democracy, likewise, the word that has endured 
so much reproach and condemnation at the 



The Square Deal — Both Ways 77 

hands of varied constituencies, the pack-horse 
for almost everything that people have found 
disagreeable and unsuccessful in politics, morals, 
and manners, so much so, indeed, that it has 
become quite accustomed to any kind of an 
onslaught; democracy that has been associated 
with the provincial self-confidence of back- 
woodsmen and Indians, and with ideas and 
customs long obsolete; democracy that has 
been called merely a "conceit of singularity'* 
and a descent to the commonplace, according 
to all historical accounts has seen a good number 
of years, even before we began to talk about 
it and dream we had it here in America. We 
may conclude that it, like Moses, must be in- 
herently a considerable force. 

Mr. James Russell Lowell, many years ago, 
near the close of his life, said: 

I have grown to manhood and am now growing 
old with the growth of this system of government 
in my native land, have watched its advances, or 
what some would call its encroachments, gradual 
and irresistible as those of a glacier, have been an 
ear witness to the forebodings of wise and good and 
timid men, and have lived to see these forebodings 
belied by the course of events, which is apt to show 
itself humorously careless of the reputation of 
prophets. 



78 American Ideals 

When the vials of wrath are all emptied, the 
citizen of these commonwealths is still a demo- 
crat, and it is still his suspicion, even when he has 
not thought about it very deeply, that it is a 
kind of blood heritage, something that it is not 
much use to fight, since it is so deeply and in- 
tuitively imbedded in the very nature of his 
life and environment. In fact, if you want to 
see this Dame Democracy at her best, you only 
need to stir her up a bit; then she is quite likely 
to make the easy-going American show his fire, 
and under these circumstances, it may be re- 
marked, he is probably more certain to think 
and to hit straight than under any other provoca- 
tion. It is this democratic idealism, both in 
politics and in general affairs, that seems to the 
American to be good and sufl&cient in itself, 
'*with all reason in it but no reason for it." It 
has been coming out recently in the matter of 
the drink problem. The question is not de- 
bated as to whether drink is a menace either to 
the individual or to the nation. This might 
be quite generally admitted by both drinkers 
and non-drinkers. The question of earnest 
debate, here as in England, which will always 
arise when this matter is broached, concerns 
the right of the state or the nation to prohibit 



The Square Deal — Both Ways 79 

an individual from taking a drink if he wishes 
to do so. It is the individual's ideal of personal 
liberty which is menaced, and this is one of the 
most inviolate sanctities in the American char- 
acter. 

Russia by a stroke of the pen may prohibit 
the use of vodka, but President Wilson could no 
more accomplish such a sweeping change than 
he could declare war against England if the 
people did not universally want it or demand it. 
The Russian peasant has been trained by gener- 
ations of obedience to authority, autocratic 
and monarchical, never to speak his mind, to 
take his orders superimposed; consequently he 
has lost much of his abiUty as well as perhaps 
something of his desire for individual expression. 
He does not know what freedom of speech means, 
and centuries of oppressive silence have bred 
not only intellectual inanition, but have also 
taught him that even if he did speak, his words 
would be powerless; he is therefore dumb. 

Not so the American. From the beginning he 
has been a moving, Hving unit in his national 
life and progress. Indeed his life and progress 
has been made by himself and his neighbor and 
by none other. The humblest farmer around 
the stove in the country store feels his sense of 



8o American Ideals 

opportunity and privilege, and voices boldly 
and dogmatically his sentiments regarding the 
nation's life, discussing at length all phases of na- 
tional welfare, from the doings of the President 
in the White House down to the acts of the local 
constable and roadmaker. He knows, further- 
more, that he counts, that his vote counts on 
election day, and it would be a foolhardy poli- 
tician who would dare to insinuate that his 
views were better kept to himself. 

It happens, therefore, that when you start to 
tell the average citizen in the United States that 
his fancied *' rights" are but the echo of his 
father's sentiment, a hollow hereditary thing, or 
at best they are only what a particular set of 
men w^ho rule him tell him they can be, he is 
quite likely to stop his ranting about ** privilege'* 
and "prohibition" depriving him of anything 
inahenable, and remark about his constitutional 
liberty principles as a certain Englishman once 
spoke of the British Constitution, "The most 
wonderful thing about it is that it works.'* 

We are inclined to surmise that it works for 
some of the same reasons, for it must be recalled 
that our democracy was almost as much English 
as American at the time of the signing of that 
important paper in Philadelphia, that ''the 



The Square Deal — Both Ways 8l 

acorn from which it sprang was ripened on the 
British oak/' It has been observed that while 
England was a monarchy with democratic tend- 
encies, the United States is a democracy with 
conservative instincts. 

The American is a democrat for much the 
same reason that we find unrest in India to-day, 
for the same reason that we saw the rather im- 
mature Filipino politician, only a brief time since, 
watching with bated breath the discussion over 
the Jones bill. It is because all over the world 
men have been first of all desirous to have a 
hand in governing themselves, because "dele- 
gated" powers have always been distasteful to 
men of spirit and dreams, and because in a de- 
mocracy there is the inevitable feeling amongst 
men that they can, if they wish to bestir them- 
selves, change conditions by their votes as well 
as by that other regnant means in their power, 
public opinion, so that the modes of life and 
work environing them will be more to their 
liking 

That there will be always and everywhere 
unrest in democracies and that there will be 
growing pains in connection with all young 
independent activities as in every healthy 
youth, goes without saying. An editor of one 



82 American Ideals 

of our large city dailies, writing of unrest in 
Canada, has expressed the matter well: 

Democracy in Canada, as in all the sister colonies 
and in Great Britain — even as in the United States — 
has at times lost its job, become seedy, gone without 
its regular meals, felt the gnawing of want, the sting 
of poverty, but through it all it has been its own 
master. If it has been improvident, wasteful, ex- 
travagant, inefficient, it has at least been free to be 
all of these, and at liberty to recover from them in 
its own way. It has not been a tagged, checked, 
numbered thing; even when hungry and down at the 
heel and out at the elbow, it has had the satisfaction 
of knowing that it was itself to blame. 

It is one of the firmly grounded principles 
here in the United States that the right of the 
people to work out their own salvation by means 
of a somewhat rigid constitution made by the 
people themselves, and amended to suit the 
changes in the national growth, rather than by 
the use of a more flexible form of government 
manipulated by an autocratic hand above them, 
forms one of the peculiar advantages of Ameri- 
can citizenship. It has been a privilege so truly 
ingrained with years of checkered experiences 
that one would start upon an almost insuperable 
task, who would try to substitute the "allow- 



The Square Deal — Both Ways 83 

ance" for the ''wage" in this country, and no 
conceded values of immediacy in a monarchy 
m the meeting of unexpected exigencies would 
for a moment compensate the democratic mind 
for the loss of his individual sense of participa- 
tion. The very grave difficulties attending the 
construction of a firm representative state, the 
wrestling with the knotty problems, and the need 
of new decisions of fresh issues by an equally 
responsible electorate, furnish the dust upon 
which the nation may bite, the exercise by which 
Its faculties are aroused, and make strong appeal 
to the intense love of the native mind for diffi- 
culty and contest with the unsubdued. 

It is in the aspiring faith and in the ideal of 
the betterment of the things that are, which 
are his by nature, and in the power of bringing 
the impossible into reality which are the Amer- 
ican's by material experience, that lead him to 
beheve that no form of government other than 
a democracy can afford his spirit adequate 
scope. That he has not reached the height of 
his democratic ideal of equality, either in laws 
or in the life of business, does not invalidate the 
ideal in his own mind, and as long as an individ- 
ual or a nation refuses to relinquish its ideal and 
is ready to fight for it withal, there is in partial 



84 American Ideals 

fulfilment or even in failure something for 
which to hope. The belief of the average citizen 
that his national dreams of a Republic with a 
''government of the people, by the people, for 
the people," will come true, if not to-day then 
to-morrow, woven into perfectness on **the 
roaring loom of Time," is the first and the 
indispensable requirement, without which any 
and all means employed would be but the break- 
ing of idle waves upon the shore. 

It is not only the presence but also the con- 
temporary encouraging results of this demo- 
cratic square-deal principle, as we see it slowly 
taking shape both in the laws and in the arena of 
daily affairs, that bring real light and hope to 
all the troubled story of remedial legislation and 
labor and business fears. Despite the fact that 
Utopian democracy is still painted on far-reced- 
ing horizons, despite the selfishness of capital 
and the equal selfishness of labor, no one, we 
believe, save the man whose vision is bent by a 
fatal censoriousness and a settled pessimism, 
can fail to note the advance in a wide area of our 
modern activities of the elements of cooperation 
and integrity belonging to a high and ordered 
progress. 

There has been a gain in the last twenty years 



The Square Deal — Both Ways 85 

in sympathetic appreciation of the other man's 
point of view, which is the prime necessity of 
successful republics. It is more common to-day 
than it was at one time to hear men saying and 
acting on the principle laid down by Theodore 
Parker, who said, *' Democracy means not ^Tm 
as good as you are,' but * you're as good as I 
am.'" There is a gain in straightforwardness 
and frankness in business, a gain that has 
pressed upstream against the ever-swifter cur- 
rent of industrial competition. People individ- 
ually and collectively are becoming increasingly 
convinced that as the Governor of Pennsylvania 
said not long ago, "It never pays to be smart, 
to *put one over' on the other fellow." 

The deal that involves injustice to the worker, 
whether the worker be a child in a mill or a 
skilled artisan in a machine shop, a clerk or a 
toiler in a ditch or on a farm, is becoming more 
and more unpopular and impossible in the fierce 
light that plays upon it from the press and poli- 
tics as well as from protective labor organiza- 
tion. The uncovering of questionable practices 
in insurance, industry, railroads, and statecraft 
have, in the memory even of our youth, aroused 
a scrutiny of conduct in the wide world of our 
coeval action that would have rejoiced and 



86 American Ideals 

gladdened the heart of a statesman no farther 
removed from us than that ardent worker for 
the age of the Golden Rule in business and na- 
tional affairs — John Hay. More honest officials 
in charge of our money and our ports have 
been demanded since his day. There are new 
schemes for the relief of the poor, for the better- 
ment of the aged by pensions, for the economy 
of the worker's time while at work and the more 
profitable use of his leisure in his hours of recrea- 
tion, for arbitration in business in lieu of de- 
structive attacks, and in diplomacy, a subject 
so dear to the heart of Mr. Hay and to which his 
wise counsels and foundations paved the way. 

Even a short-memoried man will recall our 
democratic advances in the nation-wide move- 
ment to give industrial education to our youth 
in the public schools, in the recent enormous 
enlargement of free libraries, in the aroused 
attention given to better rural conditions, in 
endless philanthropies aimed at the prevention 
or cure of disease, and in the eugenic and hygi- 
enic laws of national health. 

What are these if not eloquent expressions of 
the fact that the cause of the equal chance at 
life and happiness, the protection of the w^eak 
and the training of the strong, the sentiment of 



The Square Deal — Both Ways 87 

the square deal in intelligent practice, is still the 
light to our path and the inspirer of our progress. 
They are the most potent professions of the 
belief that the universe was not made for one 
man or one set of men alone, and that we as a 
people have not lost sight of those more spacious 
frontiers of human brotherhood which our great- 
est men have always kept in vision. 

Square-dealism is coming to mean a very real 
thing in the United States, something far more 
useful and practicable than a lawyer's glitter- 
ing generality. To the college boy it means 
that clean athletics and clean scholarship and 
clean living are far more likely to bring him 
recognition and honor among his fellows than 
their opposites, and that trickery and dissipation 
that were passed off as cleverness and marks of 
manliness twenty-five years ago now stamp him 
as an undesirable in college and load him with 
an oppressing heritage for a start in life. To 
the congressman sustained by a rising public 
opinion in morals of states, the square deal has 
meant the repeal of the Panama Canal bill, in 
the interests of a square deal, not for ourselves 
simply, but also for our national neighbors. To 
the modern self-respecting business man it has 
meant an increasing ambition to be well thought 



88 American Ideals 

of by one's business associates, to gain and to 
hold professional standing, and to maintain one's 
self-respect in the world of affairs. To the 
tradesman it signifies the reputation for just 
dealing, to give for a dollar a dollar's worth, 
and the growing belief that to make a customer 
is better than to make a sale. 

A real estate man put the matter thus: "Most 
men desire to live so that other men say, *his 
word is as good as his bond.' Most of the men 
I know prefer to have other men think of them 
as good rather than clever. They may desire 
to merit both of these qualifications attributed 
to them, but would prefer the former." 

The friends of the late Charles Frohman have 
stated, with justifiable pride in their associate, 
that a contract was never necessary between 
him and his workers, that Frohman's word was 
sufficient. Dr. David Starr Jordan has well 
summarized the extensive sweep of these present- 
day ideals, individual and national, when he 
says that the leading men of the country are 
looking to see our public life as clean, wholesome, 
just, and true as the best private life can be. 

As the wheels of progress are continually 
turning out new situations in a swiftly moving 
civilization, we must needs be careful frequently 



The Square Deal — Both Ways 89 

to define and redefine what we mean by this 
attractive and benevolent sounding term — 
equality. Certain of the gravest dangers of 
the present period in our social and industrial 
world hang upon the right understanding of 
what a square deal really signifies for men as for 
nations. 

Views on the subject vary widely and stretch 
all the way from the President's theory of the 
**new freedom" to the hearsay ideas of a 
certain recently landed immigrant who was 
found wiping his shoes on a towel in an East 
Side hotel, and who, being reprimanded for this 
rather generous use of the hotel linen, said in a 
tone of real surprise, "I thought the government 
furnished these for everybody." 

A Harvard professor is quoted as interpreting 
this "born free and equal" clause in the Con- 
stitution as meaning that men are created equal, 
not that they must remain so — which would 
seem about as far from the real meaning of the 
original instrument declaring our liberties, as 
the immigrant's impression that equality and 
freedom signified that any man could take and 
use anything he found handy. Dr. Van Dyke 
expressed the spirit of our national equahty 
more clearly when he said, "It impHes that what 



90 American Ideals 

equality exists by creation ought to remain by 
protection." 

In other words, the square deal in America 
gives every man an equal right with any or all 
competitors to enter the lists for the great prizes 
of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And 
it carefully watches the race from the judges' 
stand to see that every contestant gets a fair 
chance in accordance with the rules of the game. 
For breaking rules the penalties are supposed 
to be the same for all; for winners the prizes 
are sure, regardless of the particular endowment, 
race or social standard. No doors are barred 
in any direction as far as opportunity is con- 
cerned, the only condition being that the con- 
testant observe the laws of the contest that he 
himself helps to make, and prove worthy of his 
steel. One of our chief justices has avowed that 
the right to follow any of the common occu- 
pations of life is an inalienable right. 

The mistake of reformers in various coteries 
to be found in America at present, equipped with 
all sorts of eccentric Utopian vagaries and 
whims, lies frequently in the attempt to make 
inequalities of capacity and service equalities 
by the swift stroke of a law: a vain attempt at 
standardizing possessions without standardizing 



The Square Deal — Both Ways 91 

individuals. It is juggling with effects and not 
taking account of causes. You can equalize 
rights to work for rewards, but you cannot 
equalize the rewards without depriving individ- 
ualism of its spring and virihty. A square deal 
means a square chance to play with the other 
players, and any forced attempt by laws or 
society to make the prize winner divide his 
profits with men on the grand stand has usually 
been considered in the United States in the 
nature, not of fair play, but of hold-up. Hold- 
ups in dark streets as well as on Wall Street do 
occur in America, but they are not favored by 
the square-deal sentiment, and there is further- 
more a growing tendency to make life disagree- 
able for both kinds of footpads. In brief, the 
stram of the square-deal sentiment, so far as the 
law is concerned, is to the effect that the Govern- 
ment will invariably protect a man in his right 
of an equal chance with his fellows to live and 
let Hve. 

It is the mixing up of poHtical equality with 
social and industrial equaHty that causes much 
of our misunderstanding and dangerous differ- 
ences. Politically the square deal means the 
chance to vote. In a sense equality has purely 
a poHtical significance. That men are equal in 



92 American Ideals 

other respects is plainly false. There is a unity 
of brotherhood that must not be mixed up with 
an equality of political rights. Equal rights 
before the law, the rights of protection of Hfe 
and property, are involved in political democ- 
racy. The equal right to work and succeed, 
if one can, is also inherent in industrial democ- 
racy, but this does not carry with it the right 
either to envy or to snatch away another's suc- 
cess. The artist who painted the picture and 
experiences of Cain and Abel reveals the start 
of Cain to his lower destiny at the moment when 
he became an enemy to his brother's success 
with his sacrifices, his flocks, and his ability 
to please his God. It was not only the sin 
of covetousness and envy: it was the darker 
thought that made the lasting mark on Cain, the 
thought ''these things shall not be my brother's.'' 
There is a distinct personal as well as polit- 
ical side to equality and the square deal. Suc- 
cess depends not simply upon having a chance 
to assist in making laws, it also inheres in in- 
dividualism. Business bent, sagacity, common- 
sense, the absence of too much artistic tempera- 
ment, and the ability to work hard, to keep sober 
and save, determine eminence in the business 
or industrial world. A man can be a rich demo- 



The Square Deal— Both Ways 93 

crat or a poor democrat, and both may be good 
democrats. Neither riches nor poverty are dis- 
graces providing you have the abiHty to think 
clearly and to discriminate and to get people's 
points of view. All the square deal in the 
woild, however, cannot make lazy and worthless 
men equal with active, industrious, and good 
men. These inequalities are neither social nor 
poHtical, but personal and abiding. 

The necessity of distinguishing carefully 
between the personal right of the individual and 
the national right of the Government has been 
brought forcibly to our attention in the condi- 
tions m which we find ourselves at present 
relative to business. The very ardor with 
which we have gone reforming and renovating 
our corporate concerns in America has been 
incHned to revert upon the people in a shape 
very much resembling a boomerang. Big busi- 
ness has been investigated so much for and 
against recently that we find ourselves involved 
m a nation-wide fear. There is fear on the part 
of business as to what the Government is going 
to do, and a corresponding fear on the part of 
lawmakers as to what business in its large and 
complicated capacity is going to do. The rail- 
roads are afraid, and with no unjust fear, of the 



94 American Ideals 

Interstate Commerce Commission; the banks 
are afraid of the Federal Reserve Board and 
the Comptroller of Currency; the express com- 
panies are afraid of the Postmaster General; 
and the purveyors of food products show signs 
of fear of the Department of Agriculture. Now 
there has sprung up the new Trade Commission, 
with its inspectors and investigators going far 
and wide into the details of industry, and it is 
not strange that our industrial establishments 
show fear of such agencies. 

As a consequence of these fears both capital 
and labor suffer. Business is timid and in- 
vestors sit upon their money bags. Just at 
present labor seems to be having its innings, and 
capital is suffering for its former abuses. The 
president of one of our large life insurance 
companies has thus succinctly summarized the 
situation: 

Our great business development went far beyond 
the comprehension of the average man. This gave 
the demagogue his opportunity, and business is now 
being punished, not alone for its excesses — which 
were many — but for its successes, which were great. 

The remedy for this weakness of our democ- 
racy is identical with that which may be ap- 



The Square Deal — Both Ways 95 

plied with general benefit to almost any phase 
of our national troubled life. It is, in the words 
of the business man, the square deal both ways. 
It is the return to the simple but vital means of 
a better mutual understanding. Ex-President 
Taft has said that in America unless all are 
prosperous no one is prosperous. The remark 
is a significant one and holds much of truth, 
but the secret of prosperity is at times quite as 
much a matter of sympathy and appreciation, 
born of knowledge of the other party's situation, 
as it is of active energy and indomitable per- 
severance. Professor Palmer of Harvard once 
said that the characteristic of a true teacher 
was "an aptitude for vicariousness," the ability 
not only to realize another man's burden, but 
also the willingness, if need be, to help him 
carry it. This may be going beyond the square 
deal, even the square deal both ways. It goes 
beyond justice to fellowship, beyond business 
to brotherhood, but is it not in the light of such 
high-minded idealism as this that our Declara- 
tion of Independence saw the light.'' Have not 
the greatest blessings of democracy been pur- 
chased by sacrifice, even the sacrifice of one's 
own rights at times, in order to truly retain them 
in larger and richer possession .f* 



CHAPTER IV 
AMERICAN VERSUS ENGLISH IDEALS 

A foreign country is a point of comparison where- 
from to judge our own. 

Emerson. 



CHAPTER IV 

AMERICAN VERSUS ENGLISH IDEALS 

It was nearly thirty years ago that Matthew 
Arnold, after his visit to America, wrote in the 
"Nineteenth Century," saying that, as he 
viewed them, our dangers as a nation are "self- 
glorification and self-deception." These traits 
he attributes to "the predominance of the com- 
mon and ignoble, born of the predominance of 
the average man." The search of the EngHsh 
critic for the "sense of elevation'' was unsatis- 
factory, and reveals among other things the 
difficulty of the foreigner to get at the real 
America. 

Lord Haldane gave utterance some time ago 
to the thought that the great danger threaten- 
ing a rupture in the relations between Germany 
and the United Kingdom lay in the fact that 
owing somewhat to a common origin each 
nation imagined that it understood the other. 
The present lamentable blunders shown before 
the eyes of the world in the mistaking of mo- 

99 



lOO American Ideals 

tives and ideals of peoples closely united by the 
ties of blood and marriage, and even with ad- 
joining territories, lead to the conviction that 
there is something inalienably and racially in- 
herent in the warp and woof of every people, 
which in a sense is not translatable, especially 
to a foreigner: something which even the native 
who feels it intuitively finds it most difficult to 
express. 

In spite of the cementing ties between the 
English and the American, and not withstand- 
ing the usual talk of "motherland," these two 
countries are, in the realm of national char- 
acteristics and ideals, worlds apart. While one 
senses certain truth in the criticism of a great 
English critic like Arnold, even though that criti- 
cism is more than a quarter of a century old, 
there is yet a feeling that the real atmosphere of 
America has escaped him. Americans have been 
well supplied with books written by our cousins 
across the seas, and have seen themselves as the 
Britisher sees them in almost every type of inter- 
pretation, ranging all the way from Thackeray 
and Dickens to H. G. Wells and Arnold Bennett. 
Yet there is always, even in the most tolerant 
advice-loving Yankee mind, the suspicion that 
Americans are Americans by reason of the 



American versus English Ideals loi 

innate might of a few distinctive principles ger- 
mane to the nature of things in the United 
States, and rooted, as one might say, in the 
subsoil of this Western land — principles which 
are loath to give their color to a transient 
stranger. 

Still it is with England that our interests 
and ideals are more nearly identical than with 
any other nation, and it is to England that 
our admiration and respect have gone forth in 
a multitude of ways, even when we have been 
unconscious of it, or perhaps rather too proud 
to admit it. Since, furthermore, we were all Eng- 
lishmen in the beginning, we may be justified 
in turning to a brief contrasting study of the 
two people as a means of bringing out more 
clearly certain of the distinctive traits and 
ideals of the inhabitants of "the states." 

It is first needful to remember that the dis- 
tinctions here are traditionally not of aristocra- 
cies, but of merit; not of age and the "sense of 
elevation" derived from the contemplation of 
either majesties or monuments (since we have 
none of these), but primarily the distinctions 
centring in men and their work. There is, more- 
over, comparatively small respect in America for 
men of good birth but of bad character or unem- 



102 American Ideals 

ployed talents. Even the adornments of the 
artistic connoisseur, and of the idle or "gentle- 
man'' class, find here in this land of plain reality 
little more than curiosity and that kind of re- 
spectful attention given to unusual "specimens." 
The crowds may line the sidewalks in front of a 
Fifth Avenue church to watch the wedding 
procession of a scion of one of the few old 
famiHes of wealth still left to us; but even a 
casual study of the faces and a slight analysis 
of the remarks of the spectators will reveal the 
abysmal difference between the thoughts called 
forth by this spectacle on Fifth Avenue and 
those seemingly uppermost in the minds of the 
London watchers of nobility on Pall Mall, 
or at the marriage of the son of a duke or 
an eminent representative of an old English 
house. 

A chief engineer, on the other hand, return- 
ing from his notable labors in connection with 
the building of the Panama Canal, calls forth 
a crowd as diverse in character as it is serious 
and respectful in attention, and the man of deeds 
is placed upon a pedestal of honor and national 
regard to which the mere inheritor of wealth 
or an old family name can never hope to 
aspire. 



American versus English Ideals 103 

Through reasons more or lessevident American 
ideals gather instinctively about people like 
Edison, of whom the public never tires of 
hearing. They Hke to read how he spends long, 
sleepless nights working out his latest electrical 
arrangement, which they are certain will open 
new windows into a more usable world. The 
crowd never tires of reading or hearing of Lin- 
coln, whom certain European writers have truth- 
fully said was without ^distinction" and who 
was undoubtedly at times ordinary, even per- 
haps vulgar, both in the speech and manners 
of his day. But Lincoln visualized that which 
Americans prize higher than coronets and Nor- 
man blood— heart quality— and the nation's 
ideals and reverence cling closely about his 
memory. His homely wit and kindliness ap- 
pealed to their love of real things, and they keep 
green his grave with a sentiment as deep as it is 
disregardful of the lowliness of his early social 
station and possessions. 

This is not far from the innate respect felt in 
the souls of all men everywhere for great hu- 
manity, and in this type of elevated regard the 
dwellers on the North American continent are 
second to no people beneath the sun. 

We would not minimize the need, in this 



I04 American Ideals 

country of magic endeavor and enormous raw 
material of both heart and hand (material which 
has not yet had time to be worked into artistic 
expression), of the erection upon these strong 
basic traits of a superstructure of gentlemanly 
manners and a worship of beauty in all its forms. 
One of our New England writers has pointed out 
with sagacity that it is a good thing to have self- 
made men, but for constant association almost 
any one would prefer men whom civilization of 
the highest order has had a part in forming. 
In such matters the American may look, as in- 
deed in many another thing, to the land which 
gave England and these United States a com- 
mon stock. 

To come to a more detailed and concrete com- 
parison, one is at once struck at the amazing 
contrast between the Englishman and American 
in the realm of feeling and expression. The 
American is first of all volubly expressive, while 
the Enghshman is studiedly reserved. The 
Britisher is a kind of negationist; he is almost 
stoically repressive, and frequently inarticulate. 
John Galsworthy has said that there is no more 
deceptive person than the Englishman on the 
face of the globe, his deception being due to his 
inability as well as his unwillingness to make 



American versus English Ideals 105 

himself understood. The American, on the 
other hand, is enthusiastic, fluent, and is quite 
ready usually to examine and to expatiate upon 
his own inner feelings as well as to make a guess 
at those of other people. To hide his feelings is 
second nature to the Englishman. Should his 
emotions by some unwary chance get the best 
of him, he is usually ashamed of himself and 
expects to be laughed at. He deprecates any 
lapse from his suppressed idealism. The Amer- 
ican feels that some of this is parade, what 
Robert Louis Stevenson called, "A winking, 
curled and oiled, ultra-cultural-Oxford-don sort 
of affectation," and discounts it accordingly. 

I was talking with a young man over the 
omnipresent tea urns at Oxford regarding these 
matters of English and American traits, when 
I ventured to suggest that his father (a promi- 
nent Englishman) was a fitting example of the 
Britisher who had accomplished much work and 
had not talked much about it. When I began 
to speak of a book which had pictured this public 
man with his accomplishments in South Africa, 
the son waived the matter aside with a deprecat- 
ing gesture,saying,*' Oh, thegovernor's all right, ^' 
and suddenly turned the conversation to the last 
cricket match with Cambridge. 



io6 American Ideals 

At the Oxford Union, that miniature English 
world, where, in a manner strange to America, 
the chief members of Parliament return to pre- 
side at the sessions, helping to keep inviolate 
the English traits and the attitude of the English 
mind toward public service, I have heard 
students called down severely for giving a sug- 
gestion of emotionalism in their speeches. In 
fact, one student, who in our American judgment 
had made by far the best presentation of the eve- 
ning, was riddled as to his argument and his side 
utterly routed, because his opponents had cred- 
ited to him an attempt to play on the feelings 
of his hearers through an illustration suggestive 
of "spread eagleism." To the American, 
accustomed to the public mode of expression 
in his own land, this show of feeling would 
have hardly been noticeable, certainly not ob- 
jectionable. Another student demolished his 
opponent who had been lured into sentiment 

by saying: *'Sir, Mr. has tried to wring 

our hearts I submit. Sir, that our hearts refuse 
to be wrung!" 

The state papers, as well as the public ad- 
dresses of Englishmen, while on a high level of 
intellectual reasoning, and exhibiting frequently 
examples of choice diction, often make dry 



American versus English Ideals 107 
reading for the man who has become famihar 
with the American type of poHtical presentation. 
An American poHtician has observed that the 
only parallel to the human interest found in the 
Congressional records filed away upon the dusty 
shelves in Washington are the "popular" 
speeches of the members of the House of Com- 
mons, reported in full in the dreary columns of 
the London Times. 

A conservative master of one of the old col- 
leges at Cambridge remarked to me that the 
principle objection he found to Lloyd George 
(who was at the time delivering speeches in 
Wales on the land question) was that he re- 
mmded him of his namesake Henry George, 
whose spellbinding characteristics were as unin- 
telligible as they were distasteful to the educated 
Enghshman. The attitude is reflected in the 
statement of Francis Gribble concerning Jowett, 
the old Master of Balliol, a man "full of milk 
of human kindness, but profoundly conscious 
that milk makes a mess when it boils over, and 
firmly resolved to prevent that catastrophe by 
keeping it in a refrigerator." 

The American is also easily moved and often 
he is easily convinced. It may be added that 
he is quite as readily cooled and as readily un- 



io8 American Ideals 

convinced. His across-the-seas relative is hard 
to be convinced, but when his conviction is 
formed he is a veritable bulldog. One of his 
countrymen has said in relation to his attitude 
regarding the present war that when the Eng- 
lishman finally sees and seizes a thing, he takes 
it with the whole of his weight, and wastes no 
breath in telling you he has taken hold. 

The American is friendly and long-sufFering. 
He does not grumble over trifles, and frequently 
is justly accused of being indifferent to his 
rights, while the Englishman is the most inveter- 
ate grumbler, especially over little things, to 
be found extant, and withal the most determined 
advocate for his common rights, be these rights 
located in Liverpool, Cairo, Calcutta, or Hong- 
kong. 

As a chance traveller the Englishman is about 
as companionable as a stone image and equally 
communicative. His impermeability is a won- 
der of perfectness. A Danish gentleman who 
had lived most of his life in an English colony 
told me of his experience in crossing Russia on 
the Siberian railroad from Vladivostock to St. 
Petersburg, a journey of thirteen days, in the 
same compartment with an Englishman. Their 
conversation during the entire trip consisted in 



American versus English Ideals 109 

saying **Good morning" when they arose and 
handing each other the daily papers, for which 
each one politely thanked the other with a bow. 
Had these two men been Americans, at the end 
of the first day there doubtless would have been 
no subject in all the range between politics, 
piety, and personalities, that would not have 
been discussed with fervor and thoroughness. 
The second day would have doubtless been 
more difficult in the matter of conversation, since 
they would have told everything readily acces- 
sible the first day, but for the American, at least, 
the first day's conversation would have paid for 
the trip, and not to have expressed himself 
would have made the journey exquisite boredom. 
As a tourist, the American is the very epit- 
ome of good nature, geniality, curiosity, and 
agreeableness. He is a first-class mixer, talks 
easily, laughs easily, and his bump of inquisi- 
tiveness, together with his temerity in unearth- 
ing the unearthable, has made him the arch in- 
vestigator of the world. He goes in where angels 
fear to tread, and to want to know about any- 
thing is synonymous with finding out. When 
he is well mannered (and it must be remembered 
that not all Americans in these days travel 
on the Cleveland or in Cook parties) we ven- 



no American Ideals 

ture to say, even at the risk of being called prej- 
udiced, no world traveller of any nation makes a 
more charming and obliging comrade. 

In this relative appraisement of the globe- 
trotting class one must remember the sources 
from which the different types of English and 
Americans come. America with its quick results 
and quick money has foisted into the world of 
travel thousands of people whose forebears and 
antecedent opportunities for culture have been 
far removed from those familiar to the majority 
of the English sightseers. A manufacturer of 
machinery, for example, in the Middle West 
makes an unexpected five thousand dollars, and 
he immediately thinks of how he can expend it 
for his family. An early thought is to send his 
kindly, good-natured, domestically inclined wife, 
with her little troupe of pretty daughters, who are 
striving for something that their home town does 
not afford, to Europe, or possibly on a trip around 
the world. They take with them their freshness, 
their vivacity, their overbounding health and 
optimism and joy in every new sight, and their 
training which has been of the sort that teaches 
them to give full vent to their expressions of 
wonder or disdain. The English tourists, mean- 
while, shrug their aristocratic shoulders and 



American versus English Ideals iii 

exclaim: "Those horrid Americans!" It is 
sometimes forgotten that it is only of late 
years that the people of the same strata in 
England have been either capable or desirous 
of extending their knowledge or of gratifying 
their curiosity with the scenes of foreign lands. 
The average middle-class Englishman is con- 
tent with his home and fireside, and with good 
safe 5 per cent, investments on his money. 
These are more tangible and satisfactory assets 
in his eyes than the investment in culture for 
his wife and family. 

Kindliness and humaneness, the common 
American traits, are responsible also for the 
way in which the sorrows and calamities of the 
world cut our countrymen to the quick. His 
extremist temperament makes the American 
prodigal and sometimes foolish with his wealth, 
and he is often as impulsive as he is excessive 
in his philanthropy. Full of nervous sensi- 
bility, he wears out much mental and physical 
energy by his neighborliness. The Britisher 
in contrast is seldom excessive and goes to ex- 
tremes far less frequently. This makes for a 
certain toughness of nervous fibre that calls in 
turn for fewer sanitariums in England than in 
America; this insensibiUty to the nerve-wrack- 



112 American Ideals 

ing stress and strain of modern competitive 
existence has caused the Englishman to be 
pointed out as a good example of the conserva- 
tion of energy; it fits him peculiarly for a war 
of exhaustion in which the proverbial ability 
to "muddle through" and take things as they 
come are rare talents. This trait of repression 
and staying at home in his own feelings, this 
inaptitude for sacrificial interest in others, 
saves energy for the Englishman; it also loses 
many opportunities for being human, or so it 
appears in the American's eyes. 

In the matter of ready adjustment and 
adaptability, the American easily outstrips his 
brother of English race. Given the same ideals, 
the Yankee finds many more means with which 
to achieve them, since he has fewer binding 
restrictions upon his working. His lack of 
idee fixe and freedom-confining traditions 
leaves him free to move more easily on his bear- 
ings, and makes it possible to get things done 
with promptness and often while the English- 
man is thinking it over. The American likes 
taking risks and is a ready apostle of all pro- 
gressive measures. His conservatism, however, 
is increasingly noticeable along some lines. I 
was talking recently with the editor of one of 



American versus English Ideals 113 

the large magazines who said it was their policy 
to publish virtually nothing having to do with 
current interests in any part of the world. This 
is quite largely an acquired trait, and conserv- 
atism is naturally of slower rootage and growth 
in a country where newness, change, and ad- 
vance are attendants of all activities. That a 
thing is fresh and untried, and heretofore un- 
heard of, is usually an attractive recommenda- 
tion, when to the more cautious Britisher a 
new thing is intended to arouse hesitation, if not 
suspicion. 

A prominent English writer related to me 
recently an experience which befell him in con- 
nection with an old and very reliable pubhsh- 
ing house in London. A seemingly attractive 
book proposition, involving a number of volumes 
relating to a widely popular subject, was pre- 
sented, and one that was afterward accepted 
with avidity and much success by an American 
firm. The Londoner called in a member of his 
company to consider with him the scheme. The 
method of consideration consisted of looking 
over a dusty pile of records to discover whether 
the house had ever engaged in a similar pubHsh- 
ing venture; finding that it had not, the head 
of the estabhshment immediately and without 



114 American Ideals 

further deliberation as to the particular merits 
or demerits of the plan before him rejected 
the proposal, saying with a thoroughly satisfied 
and conclusive air: "No, we cannot accept it; 
we have never undertaken anything like that.'* 
Tradition ruled, and contemporary interest 
lost. 

A New York publisher was next approached, 
and his first question, according to the narrator, 
was, *'Is there any similar set of books in exist- 
ence?" When he had made sure that the idea 
was a new one and after he had consulted with 
his "men on the road" to find out whether they 
thought it would appeal to the latest tendency in 
current demands, he said: *'This looks good to 
us. We will take it. We believe it will make a 
hit from the start, since it is a new angle of ap- 
proach." And it did, though in England it 
might have been a dismal failure, and have 
justified fully the hesitation of the London 
publisher. It reveals the ever-ready willingness 
of the American to take a chance on a new 
thing. This same unreadiness to change from 
the English manner of doing business has been 
the reason for more than one British failure in 
the Far East, as the converse trait of fitting the 
product to the customer and the latest require- 



American versus English Ideals 115 

ment of the public has spelled success for the 
American and the German in that region. 

It is probably au fond the ideal of getting 
on, the aim of success through adaptation, that 
is felt in this drift away from any final or ac- 
cepted way of doing things. The middle-class 
Englishman, constitutionally solid and stolid, 
is satisfied and quite resigned to his fate of 
middle-class existence, taking it as a matter of 
course, and therefore devoting himself to the 
immediate duties before him. No large dreams 
or future ambitions blur his eyes. The Amer- 
ican, on the contrary, is never content and is 
always seeing himself rising out of present 
mediocrity to leadership and power in the 
class of business men or stratum of society 
immediately above him. The Englishman, 
moreover, is inclined to take his business as a 
necessary evil, especially the Englishman of the 
upper classes: a thing to be gotten over as 
quickly as possible, so that he may get on to 
something else: golf, shooting, or politics, for 
which he cares infinitely more than his real 
work. The American regards his business as 
his main activity in life; it forms often his di- 
version as well as his daily task; "he is all 
business" is an expression frequently heard. 



ii6 American Ideals 

It is the one thing for which he delays his 
pleasures and recreations and amusements and 
travel, it is the altar upon which he too often 
immolates matters of intellectual and cultural 
interests; it is a veritable religion to many, and 
no man of any other nation, not even the shop- 
keeping Chinese, worships more loyally or un- 
intermittingly the captivating gods of trade. 

It is because of his devotion to business that 
the European newspaper artists never weary 
of picturing Uncle Sam as a pork packer mil- 
lionaire and the shrewd Yankee trader with the 
head of a hog and the octopus body of a trust 
magnate. We have yet to find a company 
of foreigners either abroad or at home who fail, 
after a few moves of the conversation, to bring 
up the money wraith against the American. 
Without doubt we have here a subject of strik- 
ing interest close to the nation's ideaHsm and 
fruitful of marked comparison with English 
aims. That the American thinks in terms of 
money, and that wealth bulks large in his esti- 
mate of success, no one closely acquainted with 
him will deny, but when it comes to a compari- 
son in the matter of the reason for acquiring 
dollars, we doubt whether he will be found more 
culpable than the EngHshman. 



American versus English Ideals 117 

Certain it is that in conversation the EngHsh- 
man has been reared to talk of other things than 
his income. He has been trained to connect the 
commercial transaction with a lower order of 
society and accomplishments than those repre- 
sented by the persons and activities connected 
with public life, the realm of letters, and especially 
the careers of his miHtary and colonizing country- 
men on the seas or in distant climes. 

This contrast between the inhabitants of 
Great Britain and the United States was brought 
out humorously by an experience occurring in 
one of my trips across the Yellow Sea with a 
Scotchman and his son as travelling companions. 
The subject of the ever-present thought in the 
minds of Americans was suggested as usual by 
my Scottish friend, and with some ardor of con- 
viction I was endeavoring to show him that 
these were largely incidental accompaniments in 
the beginnings of the construction of a civiliza- 
tion, and that already there were many indica- 
tions of exchanging this subject of wealth for 
others in a wide circle of cultural endeavor in 
which the Americans were beginning to indulge 
themselves. Things were going along fairly 
well, when, during a lull in the conversation, an 
unmistakably Yankee voice cut the atmosphere 



ii8 American Ideals 

of the comparatively small dining-saloon with 
the remark, "By the way, what do you have to 
pay for a porterhouse steak at the Holland 
House?" The Scotchman looked at me from 
quizzical eyes, and it is sufficient to say that this 
ended my argument for the time being. 

When one turns to the mental consciousness of 
the two peoples, and this consciousness is closely 
akin to the spring of their ideahsm, one finds 
sharply outlined a few distinguishing features. 
In the United States it is easier to find persons 
who are self-conscious and imaginative, and who 
include the past and the future as well as the 
present in their introspective sense of themselves. 
Many an American is a dreamer, and as much of 
a failure in a practical way as is the speculative 
Easterner. There is a marked sensitiveness 
when it comes to the fear of public opinion in 
regard to his fellows, while the prevalence and 
the flourishing success of almost every kind of 
metaphysical or religious sect known on the face 
of the earth is a mark of his unquaHfied mental 
receptiveness. 

The Englishman, on the contrary, however 
much he may scout the idea of materiality in his 
patronizing attitude at times toward his New 
World cousin, dwells in the realm of facts, and 



American versus English Ideals 119 

often in the atmosphere of a bUnd practicality, 
even more than does the American. As a busi- 
ness man, the Englishman is "awfully level 
headed" and gives the impression to many 
foreigners of a distressing matter-of-factness. 
His religion he accepts as he accepts his national 
consciousness, as a matter of course, and one 
finds abstract discussions of religion and philos- 
ophy as infrequent and usually distasteful inter- 
lopers in the ordinary English conversation. 
New religions and anything that approximates 
to fads and fancies are not readily received in 
that land of conservatism. 

To the adaptable and ideal-loving American 
the popular sentiment welcomes change so rap- 
idly that in some respects it is open to the 
Frenchman's retort regarding his own people: 
*'I put no faith in any of the laws of literary 
history, except in that which consists in saying 
that a fashion succeeding another fails if it is 
not the absolute converse of that which preceded 
it." The solidity and imperturbabihty of the 
Englishman in contrast is often as unintelligible 
as it is foreign to the American temperament. 

It must be remembered, especially as far as 
the leadership of English thought and action is 
concerned, that the twenty or more large Eng- 



I20 American Ideals 

lish public schools, which have no counterpart 
on earth, and which train at least one hundred 
thousand of English youth of each generation, 
are responsible largely for this uniformity of 
mentality and this mysteriously cool, critical, 
and reserved manner. When one appreciates 
that seven eighths of the important positions, 
public, professional, administrative, as well as 
an increasingly large number of notable posts in 
England's present-day industrial enterprises, 
are held by the graduates of schools of which 
Eton, Harrow, and Rugby have been for genera- 
tions the exacting models, there is found at least 
one reason for the English mind. Here young 
England learns impartial justice, and acquires 
the knowledge of how to govern others as well 
as himself. Here the orderliness and obedience 
to law, so much needed in the United States 
just now, becomes second nature to the young 
Britisher. These schools cultivate the negation 
of self-consciousness, and are more or less in- 
imical to that type of individualism which the 
multitudinous vocational schools of America, 
with their emphasis upon individual aptitude, 
magnify and develop. 

The negative philosophy of these schools of 
England, whose spirit enters so largely into the 



American versus English Ideals 121 

English ideal, has been humorously satirized 
in a code of ten commandments of the English 
schoolboy, by a French writer in the "Revue 
Politique et Parhamentaire*': 

1. There is only one God, and the Captain of 
football is his Prophet. 

2. My school is the best school in the world. 

3. Without big muscles, strong will, and proper 
collars, there is no salvation. 

4. I must wash much, and in accordance with 
tradition. 

5. I must speak the truth even to a master, if he 
believes everything I tell him. 

6. I must play games with all my heart, with all 
my soul, and with all my strength. 

7. To work outside class hours is indecent. 

8. Enthusiasm, except for games, is in bad taste, 

9. I must look up to the older fellows, and pour 
contempt on newcomers. 

10. I must show no emotion, and not kiss my 
mother in public. 

In these training places of English schoolboys 
there is as little attention given to bothering 
about one's inner state of consciousness as one 
can imagine. One teacher told me that he did 
not want his boys to bother about their souls, 
but to take care of their bodies and their souls 



122 American Ideals 

would take care of themselves. As a conse- 
quence you will rarely see a high degree of moral 
or mental sensitiveness on the part of these 
graduates. They do not brood, neither do they 
take undue trouble about their future state. 
Neither do they sit up nights to do original 
thinking relative to their philosophy of life. 
They simply accept the traditional forms and go 
steadily along in the paths their fathers trod. 
Voluntary religion in the schools and colleges is 
almost unknown. In a visit to a wide circle of 
varying types of English institutions recently I 
found virtually no student-initiated classes for 
Bible study. In American colleges and uni- 
versities there are in striking contrast each year 
no less than 40,000 students studying the Bible, 
for the most part in student-organized and stu- 
dent-led classes. 

But in spite of the fact that the methods of 
training are so strikingly different, the English 
method fits the English mind, and these schools 
have furnished a marvellous dynamo for forging 
and moulding Englishmen. 

As far as mentality is concerned, and idealism 
in the realm of intellectual imagination, where 
idealism is particularly regnant, the American 
holds his own with the Englishman. Prof. 



American versus English Ideals 123 

Gilbert Murray of Oxford, after teaching Ameri- 
can college boys at Amherst for a year, in answer 
to my question regarding the difference he no- 
ticed among the students of American and Eng- 
Hsh schools, replied: "The American boy is 
more alert, usually I think more intellectual; he 
adapts his knowledge much more readily to the 
contemporary conditions with which he is closely 
allied. He lacks, however, the background of 
knowledge, and especially the knowledge of the 
classics common among the students of England. 
He also lacks in a certain reserve, which is one 
of the notable products of the English public 
schools." 

In a peculiar sense this college and schoolboy 
life of the two nations reflects the countries of 
which they are a part. The Englishman, re- 
pressive, matter of fact, slow to action but tena- 
cious to the end, drawing his inspirations from 
staid and sacred traditions of a great Past, takes 
his whole life more practically and with a self- 
confidence that often refuses to admit that 
idealism has part or lot in his thinking. The 
American, on the other hand, who draws his 
sentiment and ideals from the shining glory of 
the present, is not ashamed either of his dreams 
or his optimism. He has already seen so many 



124 American Ideals 

evidences of his constructive imagination that 
he is wiUing to beheve the strangest miracles 
of his mind. By the very expression of his 
enthusiasm he grows more and more convinced 
of the possibiHties both of his head and of his 
heart. As the years roll, he will become in- 
creasingly conservative, and the mannerisms of 
a new world state will be tempered by the gentler 
arts to which his hand is already becoming 
accustomed. That he will ever become English 
either in the spirit or the revelation of his ideals, 
is not to be expected, for the breath which he 
draws is filled with a different ozone, for him 
surely a more rarified and exhilarating air. As 
the ground beneath his feet stretches away to a 
continent whose borders only have been touched 
into life by the magic of his hand, likewise his 
idealism will grow, and his visions will expand 
until they are wide enough to match his bound- 
less prairies and deep enough to satisfy his rest- 
less soul. 



CHAPTER V 

AMERICAN VERSUS ORIENTAL 
IDEALISM 

But often, in the world's most crowded streets, 
But often, in the din of strife, 
There rises an unspeakable desire 
After the knowledge of our buried life; 
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force 
In tracking out our true original course; 
A longing to inquire 

Into the mystery of this heart that beats 
So wild, so deep, in us; to know 
Whence our thoughts come, and where whey go. 

Max Muller. 



CHAPTER V 

AMERICAN VERSUS ORIENTAL 
IDEALISM 

The French expression, "s^orienter" — "to find 
one's East" — is meaningful in these days of quest 
and change. This going to the East, not simply 
on a Pacific Mail steamer, but in one's thought 
journeys, is more really than we at times appre- 
ciate going back home, for it is from the East we 
came, bringing with us many of the things we 
value most highly. 

The discovery of the Orient has been the be- 
ginning of a loftier idealism for many of the sons 
of America and Europe. We have learned in 
our journeys and in our studies that the East 
has always been a golden wonderland where the 
Occidental has loved to wander and to read the 
realities of the ideal world. Max Miiller is only 
one of many whose spirits have been aroused to 
higher flights by the contemplation of the glories 
associated with the Indus and the Ganges, whose 
shores are opulent with an erudition and imagi- 
127 



128 American Ideals 

nation comparing favorably in her golden age 
with the Augustan period in the West. 

All the world is debtor to the Aryan thought 
power, insight, and speculation which trail back 
through the social and spiritual history of pris- 
tine centuries. Here in the East we find the 
home of the Sanscrit literature; it is the birth- 
place of religion; it is the "flower field of the 
soul.'' In the East we find the greatest ethno- 
logical museum on the planet, the present-day 
America to the contrary. It is here and here 
alone that the Occidental finds treasured some 
of the most precious prizes of humanity, whether 
we speak of language, of philosophy and my- 
thology, or of those primitive arts and ideals that 
have cast their Hght far along the ways trodden 
by our modern feet. 

To the East we look for the fatherhood and 
the motherhood of the most natural of natural 
religions. Here are the workers in the realm of 
the most fascinating and transparent romance 
and love myths, making a jewel casket for 
humanity more choice and inestimable than the 
fabled riches of Eastern kings. From the Orient 
come the thinkers in the region of the highly 
subtle and serene metaphysics, the framers of 
some of the most enduring social and moral 



American versus Oriental Idealism 129 

laws; from thence come the seers, the dreamers, 
and the men who know how to wait. 

Napoleon once called Egypt the most impor- 
tant land in the world. It was to find the East 
that Columbus sailed in that vast spiritual ad- 
venture that discovered the Western hemi- 
sphere. Marco Polo and Commodore Perry 
stirred the Far Eastern pool for the healing of 
the nations, and the East India Company opened 
doors through which there have come to us 
influences that the soul prizes beyond money, 
riches as incomparable as the undying verse of 
Sir Edwin Arnold. 

It is in our present marvellous development of 
the features of the outward world, of modern 
science and industry, of free institutions and 
international relations, that the East comes 
to us pleading more strongly than ever for the 
primal emphasis upon the inward and true 
world of historical and spiritual ideas, for the 
awakening of the slumbering life of religion, 
and the 

"things invisible 
And cast beyond the moon." 

The East furnishes to present-day America 
the required analogy and counterpart, if not 



130 American Ideals 

the essential ground work upon which mankind 
in the practical West must build its super- 
structure of durable idealism, and thereby carry 
its organic life to higher and higher stages. 
The Church of England hit upon the spiritual 
truth when it built all its churches facing the 
East. It is from the East that the wind of the 
spirit blows. When the needle of the religious 
compass comes to rest, it points toward the 
East. Here lies the magnetic pole. 

Of all the most pitiable of men is he who has 
not been willing to learn by sincere respect and 
careful study the lessons of the great past, 
lessons that come to us out of the night of 
time. A nation, especially, standing in the 
"foremost files of Western time*' can only at 
her peril of soul disregard Asia, with her vast 
contribution both to the old and to the new of 
the entire world. To disregard those and that 
preceding us is usually to disregard or to care 
little for those or that which are to come. To 
such an one life is a chain of sand while it ought 
to be an electric chain, making our hearts 
tremble and vibrate to the most ancient thought 
of the past, as well as with the most distant 
hopes of the future. 

We are quite generally convinced here in 



American versus Oriental Idealism 131 

America, as Europe has been for generations, 
of the lofty intellectual education and spiritual 
elevation derived from Greek thought. Upon it 
has been based the main education of English 
youth since the thirteenth century, and its 
classic and cultural value, even in these hard 
utilitarian days in America, is never quite lost 
to view in our schools and literature. Yet we 
care less about the fact that the springs of the 
earliest Greek Hebrew and Phoenician writings 
rose in the wisdom of the ancients, and, in a 
very literal sense, flowed westward through the 
"Wise Men of the East." Was it not at the 
Zoroastrian altar that the Ionian sages lighted 
their torches of philosophy? Was it not the 
conquest of Asia Minor by the Persians that 
introduced Thales and Anaximenes and Her- 
aclitus to the Uranian myths and dogmas which 
were destined to color potently the entire mass 
of Grecian thought? And was not the vaunted 
science of Moorish fame but the tapping of 
Oriental culture for the modern world? 

Ill for our learning and ill for our good sense 
of values if we travel in the Orient and read 
Eastern literature simply to behold a phantas- 
magoria of tourists and donkey trips along 
the Nile, revolting superstitions on the Ganges, 



132 American Ideals 

or even a wonderland of sentimental golden 
color, outlandish customs and legends, of the 
meanings of which we are often as ignorant as 
of the real nature of the primeval people whose 
present external and half westernized civiliza- 
tion appears only to delude and lead us astray. 

It is only as we begin to sympathize and to 
study with our imagination and idealism at 
work, quite as much as our Baedekers and pro- 
vincialism, that we appreciate that much of the 
difference between our thought and institutions 
and those of the East consists in name and not 
in substance of belief, and that the land of 
thought and beauty is linked to our land of 
action and progress by indivisible ties that 
have no latitude or longitude. We then dis- 
cover that what we have given to the Oriental 
in machinery and modern innovations has 
already been repaid us a hundredfold in the 
coinage of mental, mystical, and spiritual ideas. 

We have dwelt far too long and too expati- 
atingly upon the darker and more sensual side 
of the East in our travel books and reports. 
We have need to remember that the true spirit 
of the Orient is seldom if ever revealed through 
statistical and formal reports of agents poHt- 
ical, ecclesiastical, or educational, whose find- 



American versus Oriental Idealism 133 

ings are written all too frequently with the 
object of influencing a "constituency," or for 
securing gifts to particular propaganda. We 
plead for a point of view, and that for our own 
sake, which will regard the Oriental otherwise 
than as a heathen smoking cheroots and kiss- 
ing the feet of wooden idols; we plead for a 
regard and a study of the sages and prophets, 
especially those of East India, who were men of 
deep intellectual insight and marvellous vision 
of the unseen but not unreal world, far in ad- 
vance of many of the mystic saints of the mid- 
dle European ages. These men were taught 
through generations "to look inward upon them- 
selves, upward to something not themselves, and 
to see whether they could not understand a little 
of the true import of that mystery which we 
call life upon earth." 

First, then, in order to learn the message of 
Eastern idealism to America there is required a 
sympathetic imagination, a fraternal attitude, 
a receptive, broad, and as far as possible an 
unprejudiced religious point of view. Some 
one has said that clouds are dark to those who 
are beneath them; but that on the upper side, 
where the sun shines, they glow with golden 
splendor. 



134 American Ideals 

We need first of all to localize the Orient. 
It is not one as the West is one, either in geog- 
raphy or in civilization of the outer and inner 
man. In this comparison for this particular 
purpose we would do well to eliminate the 
Mohammedan sections of North Africa, where 
advanced thought has largely stagnated, as 
well as certain parts of the modernized China 
and Japan, where a different set of impressions 
as well as a different set of characteristics of 
mankind appear from those which are found in 
East India, the very heart of Asia, the Mecca 
and the mother of idealism. 

It is in the contrast of these ideals, especially 
the ideals of the spirit and the rehgion of India 
and America, that the sharpest antitheses are 
induced and the most suggestive thought is 
aroused. 

Indian ideals furnish instantly a decided con- 
trast to those current in the United States in 
their social import. As perhaps no country in 
the world has the ideal of democracy so deeply 
ingrained as America, there is no land intrin- 
sically more undemocratic than India in its 
traditional ideals, and no hierarchy of religion 
more absolute and rigid than the Brahmin caste. 
While missionary endeavor has done much to 



American versus Oriental Idealism 135 

prepare the way, the modern and economic and 
educational advance from the West has been 
perhaps even a more rapid force in recent years 
to lessen the social chasm existing between East- 
ern and Western standards of society. Far 
more than in any European monarchy is it true 
in India that a man born in a certain grade or 
partition of society is inevitably imprisoned 
there regardless of his acts or any possible de- 
velopment. It is one of the first things that 
the American notices in India, and he cannot 
understand it, so utterly incompatible is it to his 
Western ideas of social association. 

In India in the past, moreover, as in America 
in the present, idealism has found its foundation 
in the inherent and eternal forces of nature. 
The Hindu has gone beyond the face of nature 
to inquire into its universal and spiritual laws 
and the genesis of its universal mind; while the 
American has been busying himself in the sub- 
duing and directing of nature's material and 
more easily observed phenomena. The West- 
ern country has concerned herself with the 
external subjugation of the universe, with the 
"how" of natural law rather than with the 
"why" of the internal working of this universe. 
It has been accurately pointed out that the 



136 American Ideals 

religion of India resembles more closely Western 
science in its methods of procedure, and in that 
very particular is more unlike Western faith, 
which until recently has looked askance at the 
scientist as a contributor to revealed religion. 
Where American behef says Man, Indian faith 
says the Universal, or the Absolute, into which 
man melts for his emancipation. Where the 
Westerner says Humanity, the Easterner says 
Vision, and the ultimate aim of its most thought- 
ful leaders, as saints and ascetics, have been 
with consistent energy to endeavor to see God 
face to face. 

The methods also by which the East and 
West have worked toward their idealism are 
alike dissimilar. The East lays small stress on 
matter. Essentially and eventually it is to him 
passing and illusory. Buddhism asserts that 
the chief hindrance in the path of progress to 
ideals is the obstructing barrier of Desire; the 
Hindu holds before his eyes the subduing of 
it, not by chaining it, as would the American, 
but through the influence of meditation and 
the continued discipline of reflection and retire- 
ment from the world, to gain over it a spiritual 
ascendancy. 

The only lasting peace of the spirit, says the 



American versus Oriental Idealism 137 

Hindu, resides in a gradual but certain drawing 
apart from all the troublous scenes and ephem- 
eral temporalities of the garish day, until the 
spirit shall be actually unfettered and the eye 
clarified to behold perfect knowledge and un- 
sullied purity. While the Bible, in the con- 
ception of the American, leads by service to his 
ideals, the Vedanta conducts the Indian soul by 
knowledge, by love, or by emancipated motive, 
as the case may be. The aim of one is brother- 
hood, the aim of the other is the personal knowl- 
edge of the Universe of God. Each needs the 
other for completeness. Each is but the half 
truth of complete and perfected idealism. The 
New Testament may gain from the Vedas, while 
without the idealism practical and philanthropic 
of the Gospel of Jesus, Indian metaphysics is a 
chartless ship upon a vague and mystic sea. 

The absence of dependence upon scientific or 
historical phenomena furnishes a striking char- 
acteristic diflPerence to Western ideas and prog- 
ress. The Indian bases all or chiefly all of his 
advance upon the unassisted personal thought 
and experience, unfettered by the impedimenta 
of past, present, or future materiality. He 
must escape from the world with its time and 
sense Hmitations, and the pathway of his de- 



138 American Ideals 

liverance is by the road of thought. The 
American contrastingly is working at the domi- 
nation of nature, the force which his Indian 
brother is deeply engaged in meditating ways to 
elude. 

The Easterner is primarily interested in ideas, 
the American in action; the Easterner's forte is 
sentiment and imagination, the American's 
reason and science. In the East life is the ideal, 
while in the West the ideal is more often the 
living. The Bengali Hindu is said to be the 
most unpractical creature on earth; "a dreamer 
and a great failure" is the description by Sarojini 
Naidu, the Indian poetess, of her father, who 
typifies the men of his class; the American 
business man is known the world over for his 
practicality and directness, his shrewdness in 
the bargaining of things material, and he is 
less frequently a failure, at least from the stand- 
point of the accumulation of wealth. 

The American depends upon the world of time 
and practical material foundations. These are 
the chief stimuli for the awakening and the 
enlistment of his ideal powers. The Oriental be- 
lieves that in the calm and discipline of medita- 
tion, self-analysis, and synthesis. Truth, the all 
important thing to be striven for in life, can be 



American versus Oriental Idealism 139 

attained. To the American the most revered 
term in India, "Saint/' is comparatively mean- 
ingless, while the Western idol of industrialism 
leaves the traditional Hindu mind quite un- 
stirred. 

The great deeps of India's millions are still 
Indian, intensely so in their idealism, true to 
the national ideas and ideals of their forefathers. 
That which Puritanism gave in morals and faith 
in America, the Dharma, the National Right- 
eousness of the old Hindu ascetics, accomplished 
for India. It has given her a bent toward 
national consciousness well-nigh unintelligible, 
without study, to Europe or to the United States. 

To be sure these terms and this spirit are being 
modified on the surface just now by the invading 
economic West, which is pressing its way into all 
the departments of the Eastern world. The 
outward progress of this modification would 
lead the superficial observer to beheve that the 
East was becoming West with a bound. I 
found the Gaekwar of Baroda establishing a 
system of compulsory education and installing 
cinematographs throughout Baroda State. I 
found Brahmins of Bombay organizing an ag- 
ricultural college to which they were planning 
to send their own sons: almost an unheard-of 



140 American Ideals 

thing in Indian history, to see the thinking class 
harboring for a moment the idea of soiling their 
hands with the labor that has always belonged 
to the lower orders of society. The students 
also in the five great government universities 
were found exhibiting almost a mania for learn- 
ing to read and speak English, simply because 
English is the quickest road to success in 
government, official, and even in industrial 
preferment. One of the most prominent heads 
of a great business enterprise in Calcutta is a 
Hindu of high caste, but he is wise enough to 
commit the offices of chief trust and responsi- 
bility in his firm to foreigners, recognizing the 
limitation of his countrymen, through years of 
training along philosophical and spiritual lines, 
to cope with the keen competitive minds and 
equipment of the Englishman. 

Nor is this tendency of the Indian to keep 
away from practical aflFairs a dead letter, even 
in the midst of these secularizing tendencies. 
In the same cityin which the things are occurring 
of which we have been writing I found dozens 
of the Hindus, who were the best trained intel- 
lectually of the natives whom I met, deliberately 
planning to give up participation in the active 
life of affairs in order to go off into an isolated 



American versus Oriental Idealism 141 

place to become Sanyassis, and to devote the 
entire remainder of their life, in accordance 
with Indian custom, to meditation and the dis- 
covery of those principles which they believe to 
be most potent in solving for them the riddle of 
the spiritual universe. 

One can hardly conceive of more antipodal 
contrasts in ideals than those existing for the 
normal life work in India and in America re- 
spectively. To the Indians for generations life 
is a matter to be divided into four divisions: 
first, the life as a child and a student; second, 
as a householder and the father of a family; 
third, a partial recluse, leaving the business 
world, but not necessarily his family ties; and 
fourth, the ascetic or Sanyassi period when he 
leaves everything, business, family, all, and re- 
tires to the jungle or the desert with his staff and 
begging bowl to follow in the footsteps of his 
most revered national heroes. 

The American, in sharp contrast, regards his 
early education simply as a preparation for his 
business or his professional career, and at the 
full meridian of his manhood, when the Indian 
is thinking about leaving the strife of the world, 
his Western antithesis is enlarging his activities, 
and beginning to see the fruit of his experience 



142 American Ideals 

and his toil. Later on, should the American 
leave his much loved activity, which he is in- 
creasingly loath to do, it certainly is not for 
purposes of asceticism, but notably for an oppo- 
site reason, in order that he may enjoy the com- 
forts and emoluments of his successful years. 

The loss to India by this retirement through- 
out the centuries, especially in the economic, 
commercial, and industrial worlds, of the best 
brains of the empire, has been untold. That 
the Indian is this intellectual, and highly gifted, 
and as one has described him, "a radiant 
Asiatic personage," with powers of philosophical 
and mystical thought far in advance of the 
Westerner, can be easily verified by any one who 
takes the pains to become acquainted with the 
upper classes of these remarkable men and 
women. They constantly impress one with the 
thought of what would have been possible in 
India if these talented people had given their 
attention to industrial enterprises as in America, 
or to militarism as in Germany. As it is, they 
afford to our Western eyes, intent upon activity 
and many-sided business, the example of charac- 
ter and ideals that alone can eventuate from 
reflection upon the world and man's relation to 
it, gathering its power and conviction, not from 



American versus Oriental Idealism 143 

test tubes and workshops, machinery and mer- 
chandise, but from meditation and personal 
experience in first-hand contact with considera- 
tions of the perfect and the true. The question 
in India is: "What is true for me?" not "What 
have others found out, or what have scientists 
observed?" The Hindu's rehgion and ideals are 
peculiarly individual, and can never be made 
second hand or received whole from his an- 
cestors. 

America, the land of widespread missionary 
idealism, the country from which millions of 
dollars go yearly to support American workers 
in Asia, is not always conscious of the striking 
contrasts in aims and motives that actuate life 
in the Eastern and the Western world. It has 
been doubtless because of these abysmal differ- 
ences in ideals that the success of Western mis- 
sionaries in reaching especially the intellectual 
element in Eastern civilization has been so 
surprisingly slow. In India, especially, while 
hundreds of thousands of the lower classes have 
been won to Christianity (and not always for 
reasons otherwise than economic and the gaining 
of a higher social standing), the failure of West- 
ern religious idealism among the gifted and 
leading classes has been as marked almost as 



144 American Ideals 

the despairful efforts to win over the Moslem 
to the Christian faith. While recent moderniza- 
tion has loosened the faith of the Oriental in 
certain of his traditional philosophical and reUg- 
ious tenets, his wide knowledge and conception 
of what he considers to be the failure of Chris- 
tianity in Western nations has not induced him 
to exchange his own faith for that of the for- 
eigner. 

The bringing of thoughtful, sensible, and more 
truly unprejudiced missionaries of the tolerant 
sort into touch with the Oriental in recent years 
has tended to bring about, it must be noted, 
both in India and in all Eastern nations, a de- 
cided change in the methods of working, and 
also a more thorough realization on the part of 
Americans that the Easterner has grasped his 
set of religious truths with a devoted intelligence 
as surprising as it is impregnable to the Western 
propagandist. 

Those who have read the autobiography of 
Dr. John E. Clough, whose successes were as 
great as his tolerance, will get a glimpse into 
this growing mental sympathy of our best mis- 
sionary ideals as they have come into contact 
with Eastern thought. Going out to India as 
a Baptist missionary to the Telegus from one of 



American versus Oriental Idealism 145 

the new Western colleges, a true American, 
devoted to his particular and not over-liberal 
brand of faith, he carried with him the American 
adaptable energy and the self-confidence, not un- 
touched by American provincialism. He tells 
how his forty years among the low-caste Matigas 
and Telegu communities virtually revolution- 
ized his ideas and made over his faith in almost 
all his original doctrines, save those naked 
fundamentals relating to the uniqueness of the 
Christian gospel of brotherly love. 

"It distressed many thoughtful men and women 
in Christian lands at that time," he writes, "to think 
that unless the heathen heard the Gospel of Jesus 
Christ and accepted it, they would be eternally lost. 
This was my opinion when I went to India. It 
formed my missionary motive. I looked upon the 
Hindus as simply heathen; I wanted to see them 
converted. As the years passed I grew tolerant, and 
often told the caste people that if they could not or 
would not receive Jesus Christ as their Saviour, to 
serve their own gods faithfully. During my visits 
to America I sometimes told American audiences 
that the Hindus were in some respects better than 
they." 

With such growing tolerant respect for East- 
erners, Dr. Clough's work experienced a striking 



146 American Ideals 

success, and when he left India for the last 
time, in 1903, the Telegu mission over which he 
presided had one hundred missionaries, 50,000 
members, and 200,000 adherents. 

Dr. Clough's American power of adjustment, 
associated with an ever-growing, broader, and 
deeper love for humanity in the large, which the 
New Testament teaches all in vain for many 
propagandists, taught him sympathetic im- 
agination; he caught the true nature of the 
Indian situation. He learned that by unity 
and not antipathy a man learns the heart of 
another race of men; he lost his theology and the 
usual *' heathen" illusions current at home; he 
became "all things to all men," and exemplified 
in an illuminating instance the effective type of 
missionary idealism of America. 

It reveals its trend of progress slowly but 
certainly toward the discovery that when the 
spirit of man truly aspires Godward, be it under 
the cold gray skies of the West or beneath the 
warmer glory of the Southern Cross, there is or 
should be no East, no West, no dividing sym- 
bolism, no obstructing superior or inferior creed 
— only a vast world soul with restless and insa- 
tiable aspirations reaching up to its Creator and 
filled with infinite longing for its Eternal Home. 



American versus Oriental Idealism 147 

What Eastern ideals then coincide with 
American, and in what particular way can we 
*'find our East?" It goes without saying 
that the first essential is a large ability of re- 
ceptiveness. We must be ready to see our 
limitations and be willing, as the Japanese have 
been, to borrow the best things from other 
nations. Emerson once said that great genial 
power comes, not by being original at all, but 
rather in being altogether receptive. 

It is in the realm of ideas, rather than things, 
that we have always been borrowers from the 
Orient, and ideas are stronger than armies. 
Even baseless ideas like those on which much of 
Buddhism rests, with its ceaseless revolving 
gyrations of reincarnated worlds, moving like 
dancing dervishes, even these ideas have had 
already an enormous effect upon Europe and 
are not absent from our present-day thought. 

The reflex action of Indian ideas is seen in our 
acceptance of Oriental art and Asiatic decora- 
tion, while Eastern coloring is now a common- 
place in our country. The attempt of certain 
religious sects to prove and to exhibit concretely 
the fact that, through the domination of self 
by the grasp upon spiritual principles and truth, 
there can be brought about the rulership of the 



148 American Ideals 

body, sin, and disease, seems to be one of the 
growing and successful ideas in America. The 
insistence upon the illusiveness of matter by 
many religious people is peculiarly suggestive 
of " Maya," or the "all is illusion" idea of the old 
Vedanta. 

Furthermore, if we are to take the interpreta- 
tion of Walt Whitman at the hands of Mr. J. A. 
Symonds, we are led to the conclusion that this 
presence of the all-pervading Universal Spirit 
emphasized in the East is the very core of the 
Whitman philosophy. 

These Eastern ideas find also sympathetic 
reception in the Western world in the realm of 
our daily life and standards of living. This 
is not seen so much in their abstract meta- 
physics, for we in America are too much inter- 
ested and impressed by our material successes 
to be deeply moved by the thought of depend- 
ence upon the universal laws or the spirit 
behind the Universe. We are rather receptive 
to the Asiatic quietness and freedom from social 
restraint, the need of which is already troubling 
us as a nation. There are repeated indications 
revealing the fact that Americans are concerned 
over the loss of thought periods, and the proper 
adjustment of their leisure time to things that 



American versus Oriental Idealism 149 

are worth while and capable of bringing deep- 
est satisfactions. 

In our large cities especially, the constant 
being "on the wheel" of duties and engagements, 
and the never-ending social obligations, are 
getting on the nerves of even the restless, action- 
loving people. They are looking about more 
eagerly than ever before for a mode of life and 
ideals of conduct that will liberate them from 
the slavery of a thousand things they must do 
and which often they care little about, things 
with which, in fact, they would not fill their 
lives were it not conventionally correct and 
necessitous to contemporary civilization in the 
United States. 

The art of being quiet, the habit of contem- 
plation, the will power necessary to fence off 
one's life for a time to be alone, these are almost 
lost arts and vanishing ideals in the midst of 
the present-day exacting city life. It is partly 
because of the adherence to these endless 
** duties" of business and social existence that 
the Oriental of high breeding and culture finds 
our civilization irksome and in contrast prefers 
his own. Outside of the requirements of relig- 
ion, and the necessary obedience to the govern- 
ing authorities, the Oriental feels less restraint 



150 American Ideals 

than does the Occidental, and some of our 
customs would be unsupportable to him, leaving 
him little time for his favorite occupation of 
meditation and discussion, requiring intellectual 
and rehgious thought. 

An English writer has quoted from a Turkish 
gentleman whose dilemma in changing his life 
from the Near East to Paris reveals somewhat 
humorously the Oriental's point of view in 
these matters. It is also a thought-provoking 
paragraph for our restless, rushing days: 

What I complain of is the mode of life. I am 
impressed, not by the official duties, they are easy, 
Turkey has few affairs — but by the social ones. I 
have had to write fifteen notes this morning all 
about trifles. In Turkey life is sans gene; if a man 
calls on you he does not leave a card; if he sends you 
a nosegay, he does not expect a letter of thanks; if he 
invites you, he does not require an answer. There 
are no engagements to be remembered and fulfilled 
a fortnight afterward. When you wish to see a 
friend, you know that he dines at sunset; you get 
into your caique, and row down to him, through the 
finest scenery in the world. You find him in his 
garden, smoke his chibouque, talk or remain silent 
as you like, dine, and return. If you wish to see a 
Minister, you go to his office; you are not interfered 
with or even announced; you lift the curtain of hia 
audience room, sit by him on his divan, smoke your 



American versus Oriental Idealism 151 

pipe, tell your story, get his answer, and have finished 
your business in the time it would take here to make 
an appointment — in half the time that you waste 
here in an ante-chamber. 

There is no dressing for dinners nor for evening 
parties; evening parties, indeed, do not exist. There 
are no letters to receive or to answer. There is no 
post hour to be remembered and waited for. Life 
gHdes away without trouble. 

Here everything is troublesome. All enjoyment 
is destroyed by the forms and ceremonies, which are 
intended, I suppose, to increase it or to protect it. 
My Liberal friends here complain of the want of 
political liberty. What I complain of is the want of 
social liberty; it is far more important. Few people 
suffer from a despotism of the government, and those 
suffer only occasionally. But this social despotism, 
this despotism of salons, this code of arbitrary little 
reglements, observances, prohibitions, and exigencies, 
affects everybody and every day and every hour. 

We believe it will be possible to find Americans 
who would not only smile but also supplicate 
for a taste of Oriental customs that would leave 
them free from social and oftentimes distressing 
and time-consuming obligations. The deliver- 
ance from the oppression of being driven al- 
ways by details would bring to the American not 
passivity or the afternoon temper of the East 
(who could imagine an American yogi?), but it 



152 American Ideals 

would bring about that precious jewel far too 
uncommon in America — peace of mood. It 
would deliver many a man from worry by giving 
him a new perspective and the steadier grasp 
upon his preemptory task. With the inculca- 
tion of such ideals and customs, all too strange 
in the United States, there would come a sense 
of triumph over our work and the ensnaring 
affiliations that war against the gaining of new 
forces of will and the attaining to a higher su- 
premacy of spirit of which Americans are truly 
capable. It would also add to that "inward 
rest" of which Charles Kingsley has spoken: 

I know that what we all want is inward rest, rest 
of heart and brain. The calm, strong, self-contained, 
self-denying character which needs no stimulus, for 
it has no fits of depression; which needs no narcotics, 
for it has no fits of excitement; it needs no ascetic 
restraint, for it is strong enough to use God's gift — 
without abusing it. A character, in a word, which 
is truly temperate, not in drink and food merely, but 
in all desires, thoughts, and actions. 

After all, are not ideals of any sort dependent 
largely upon having time "to think into it," as 
Sir Isaac Newton once explained the secret of his 
discoveries. The example of President Wilson, 
cutting himself free from a round of distracting 



American versus Oriental Idealism 153 

official and social funcrions, refusing to see office 
seekers, slipping away alone from the White 
House, leaving diplomats and politicians, to- 
gether with endless consultations, behind him 
in order to secure solitude in which to think 
through high matters of state — this example of 
our chief magistrate has made a deep and whole- 
some impression upon the country: it has raised 
national respect for the ideals of restraint and 
thought power, the gifts in which the Oriental 
excels. 

There is still one other bond of helpful union 
existing between Oriental and Occidental ideal- 
ism; it exists in the realm of the imagination and 
in that bond of mystic feeling which belong alike 
to both of these antipodal worlds. Idealism, it 
may be remarked, has small respect for latitudes 
or points of the compass. While the American 
would not be defined primarily as a romanticist, 
neither would he be accused usually of mysticism, 
yet in both of these elements his nature is rich 
and inevitably seeking for expression. He lives 
in a terrestrial and practical world, but poetry 
and sentiment lurk within him, and only await 
the awakening touch of strong incident or soul- 
arousing circumstance. Far more readily than 
the matter-of-fact Englishman would the Amer- 



154 American Ideals 

ican understand and sympathize with the East 
Indian. 

"We worship the Ganges with the water of 
the Ganges,'* says the Hindu, "but we must 
worship." 

It seems at first glance a far cry from the 
man who worships the Ganges to the hard- 
headed business American. With all his urgent 
aggressiveness, however, and his practicality, so 
unlike the Easterner, there is an inevitable vein 
of worship in America, not in terms of the gold 
standard, but in the language of those elements 
that have to do with a higher pantheism. It is 
not difficult to find Americans with a tendency 
to dream dreams, to feel deeply the passion for 
beauty in all her myriad forms, and in those 
highest expressions of mystic and romantic 
charm which his money is inadequate to pur- 
chase for him. George WilHam Curtis, who 
dreamed of his castles in Spain in a narrow New 
York tenement house, is not a solitary type. 

This idealism of feeling, sentiment, and at 
times of mysticism is revealed in a hundred ways 
in America. It takes on well-nigh every form, 
from the characteristics of the man of my ac- 
quaintance who spends his vacations and every 
Saturday in the woods, planting seeds whose 



American versus Oriental Idealism 155 

flowering other eyes than his own will see, to the 
baker whom we know, who plays the harp be- 
cause the artistic side of his nature must have 
an outlet. 

To be sure, the average American is a bit 
chary of talking much about these elements of 
his nature in a land where everything is so 
strictly business. But if you get him alone on 
some long vague walk at night by the sea be- 
neath the stars, you will find the great deeps of 
his life's loyalties breaking up, and there below 
all his furious and often premeditated attempts 
at concealment you will discover the real man 
of dreams and visions. Here he displays all the 
subtle charm of youth that is lost in the sense 
of its own significance. Here he moves about 
in a mysterious paradise, natural to him, for it 
is all his own. Here he reveals the man of emo- 
tion, and undefined longings, and a deep sense of 
the romantic possibilities of life. 

There is probably no person extant whose vein 
of mysticism and worship of the things of the 
spirit lies deeper, or whose interest in things of 
soulful import can be more easily aroused than 
is the case with the East Indian; it is our belief 
that the American in his inherent nature comes 
next in possession of these subtle characteristics 



156 American Ideals 

of emotion and poetic feeling, which need only 
time and surcease from his exacting round of pro- 
saic practicaHties to be brought to the surface. 
Many an American aspiration, freed from its 
restricting bonds, would take up the strain of the 
Chinese poet as indicative of its most genuine 
idealism: 

The Lady Moon is my lover, 
My friends are the oceans four. 
The Heavens have roofed me over, 
And the dawn is my golden door. 
I would liefer follow the condor 
Or the seagull soaring from ken. 
Than bury my Godhead yonder 
In the dust of the whirl of men. 

The American one day in the fullness of time 
will **find his East," and when that hour arrives 
there will be a betrothal before the eyes of the 
world between Orient and Occident such as 
never before was known. 



CHAPTER VI 
EDUCATION THE AMERICAN PASSION 

The theory of education we are attempting to set 
forth is one that assumes that the activities of Hfe 
should be evaluated according to a spiritual standard 
v^hich finds the highest good of man in the perfection 
of his spiritual nature — in nobility of heart and mind, 
in reverence and awe, in contemplation of the accept- 
ance of duty in strenuous endeavor, in earnest long- 
ing for truth, in appreciation of beauty, in an esti- 
mate of the things of life consistent with the view 
that what a man is far outweighs what he has, 
whether of material or intellectual possessions. 

J. Welton, D. Litt. 
University of Leeds. 



CHAPTER VI 

EDUCATION THE AMERICAN PASSION 

Dr. Charles W. Eliot, the emeritus American 
educator and father of schoolmasters, has set 
before his countrymen this ideal of the educated 
man: 

A man of quick perception, broad sympathies, and 
wide affinities, responsive but independent; self- 
reliant but deferential, loving truth and candor, but 
also moderation and proportion; courageous but 
gentle; not finished, but perfecting. 

Something of an order to be sure, and also a 
reminder of the cultural American of Emerson's 
period rather than of these modern days of 
scientific educational absorption; but that this 
or something akin to it has ceased to be the 
inherent ideal of the nation, consciously or un- 
consciously held, not even those who are most 
intimately familiar with the manifold and com- 
plex attempts to adjust the new processes of 
natural science to the ever-changing conditions 
of daily living, will be swift to deny. 

IS9 



i6o American Ideals 

The educational ideal in America, like many 
another one, is an inheritance, a strain of blood, 
and it has woven itself inextricably into the 
pattern and the product of the Republic. It 
has become more and more a passion with us, 
this idea of the right and riches of training; it is 
a thing we as a nation care for more than we 
care for money or for power if the sign of such 
allegiance can be measured by the sacrificial 
wealth and energy we pour out for its possession. 

That the "school must save the state" as well 
as the individual is no empty sentiment in this 
land. It is history. It is the most profound 
conviction of experience. It is the chief con- 
cern of American democracy. The schoolhouse 
that our Pilgrim forefathers placed so promptly 
beside the church when this new world of the 
West was born has been repaired; it has been 
enlarged; but it has never been torn down. Our 
fathers and our mothers taught in it a mere 
handful of country school children when their 
own torch of learning was a tallow dip by night 
and a few battered textbooks; and to-day 
700,000 teachers in the United States follow in 
their train, and with every equipment known to 
modernity these are opening the book of knowl- 
edge to 28,000,000 American youth. 



Education the American Passion i6i 

For this educational ideal the people of the 
United States spend yearly ^700,cx>o,ooo — two 
thirds of this amount upon schools and colleges 
supported by public funds — more wealth than 
the total for army, navy, pensions, and interest 
on the public debt taken together. The people of 
the country have replaced the small New England 
schoolhouses with school property for which 
they have expended $1,200,000,000. The pubHc 
schools with their 20,000,000 of young people 
have been called "the vital knot" of the social or- 
ganism, and school problems have become almost 
synonymous with national problems. Truly if 
America is another word for opportunity, educa- 
tion is the key that the people use with which to 
translate the term into avenues of utilization. 

American education draws many of its ideals 
as well as its vital impulse from its Pilgrim an- 
cestry, and the early settlers of the land decided 
at the start much of the destiny and the educa- 
tional passion of the nation. They helped to 
make education in America a firm and almost 
intuitive conviction that no child or person who 
wants it, or has for it a desire and capacity, 
should be denied the chance of schooling. 

"If a boy in any country village," writes James 
Russell Lowell, "showed uncommon parts, the clergy- 



i62 American Ideals 

man was sure to hear of it. He and the squire and 
the doctor, if there was one, talked it over, and the 
boy was sure to be helped onward to college; for next 
to the five points of Calvinism our ancestors believed 
in a college education; that is, in the best education 
that was to be secured. The system, if system it 
could be called, was a good one, a practical applica- 
tion of the Doctrine of Natural Selection. Ah I 
how the parents — nay, the whole family — moiled 
and pinched that their boy might have the chance 
denied to them!" 

The ideal of education, a corner stone of the 
New England commonwealths, has thus stood 
historically in the United States for intellectual 
independence as truly as the Constitution has 
signified our political freedom. Americans have 
always believed in the democracy of the mental 
powers. In these early educational efforts in 
Massachusetts and Virginia, our forefathers 
lifted the states out of mere geographical pio- 
neering into the realm of the ideal, the intellec- 
tual, and the abiding. These first educators, with 
their penchant for individualism, which has 
grown with the nation's growth, and has made 
the United States probably the most truly dis- 
tinctive nation on earth as regards the attention 
given to individual training, started a school sys- 
tem — if it could be thus dignified — that never 



Education the American Passion 163 

could have eventuated in a fast national caste. 
In the words of Emerson, these early educational 
pioneers believed in the "infinitude of the pri- 
vate man/' Individualism was the axis upon 
which American education began to turn and 
it is distinctively prominent in the latest type 
of institution. In his first address to the mem- 
bers of the new pioneer class of Stanford, the 
founder said: "You are the most important 
factor in this university. It is for your benefit 
that Stanford has been established." We would 
no more expect to see in America a prescribed or 
set nation-wide policy for training the youth than 
we would look to find here a State church. The 
United States Bureau of Education at Washing- 
ton, where the Commissioner of Education, a 
non-political officer of the Government, collects 
and analyzes educational data and statistics, is 
only the advisory agent of the nation engaged 
in the large task of gathering and attempting 
to standardize and bring unity from a vast 
output of modern methods, textbooks, and sub- 
jects found in the various types of school admin- 
istration of the states. His work is not by 
authority, but by influence, and he advises 
when asked. In America you cannot say, as it 
is said in Germany, that if you can find out 



164 American Ideals 

what subject the pupils are studying in any 
given school, you may know what every student 
of the Empire is studying at that particular 
hour. The American has been as truly a non- 
conformist in his educational ideals as in his 
religion, and every state is jealous of its rights in 
this regard. 

The educational leaders have stood for an 
equality of opportunity everywhere, in the great 
state universities with their free tuition to all 
the youth of the state as well as in the little 
free school of the country, where every boy and 
girl of whatever station or nationality learns the 
three R's in a single bare room filled with wooden 
benches. The American has suffered no heredi- 
tary or contemporary executive authority over 
his instructional life, and his nation-wide faith 
in the power of education is one of his distinctive 
traits. His school has always borne the words 
"free"; it has always been the school for the 
individual. 

It was in such a spirit that our first public 
schools were planted on Dutch, English, and 
Swiss models in 1621; it was with such freedom 
that Harvard College, springing from Emmanuel 
College at Cambridge, England, came into being 
in 1636. The sign of the persistency of that 



Education the American Passion 165 

liberty-loving ideal, rooted so early in the soil 
of New England, comes out to-day in many a 
university conflict for freedom of teaching, as 
though it were but yesterday that it was enun- 
ciated by our Pilgrim sires. 

America owes a debt to her ancestor school 
teachers because of the fact that she stands to- 
day offering the promise and right to every child 
in the land to become educated, not as a nation 
wills, but as his own inclination and aptitude 
determine. 

The ideal of education in the United States 
has thus evolved a pronounced practicality, and 
its slogan, even from the beginning, has been 
"fitting for life work." Its aim is to learn to 
apply, to do as well as to know. The modern 
sweep of this ideal has carried virtually all 
before it. It has made America the marked 
country of utilitarian education. 

When a member of a British Commission 
came here some years ago to study our educa- 
tion, he made special mention in his report of 
the University of Wisconsin, because, he said, *St 
knits together the professions and labors; it 
makes the fine arts and the anvil one." 

There are institutions in the United States, 
small colleges in NewEngland as also in the Mid- 



i66 American Ideals 

die West, high schools and private academies, 
moreover, whose liberally educated instructors 
are like the present Master of Winchester in 
England, who said recently that he was "holding 
on to the classics for dear Hfe." There are to be 
found here and there both teachers and whole 
schools refusing to fall into line with the utility 
ideal of training which is running strong through- 
out the country. Nevertheless, even a casual 
foreign observer realizes that the education as a 
whole lies in the realm of the contemporary 
affairs of the nation, in making "fine arts and 
the anvil one." 

Thus the America of the present has added to 
the curriculum of the EngHsh forefathers, who 
took the torch of learning passing down from 
Milton, the English Puritans, and the line of 
"lantern bearers," from Shakespeare, Beaumont, 
and Fletcher and "rare Ben Jonson." This 
Western land has supplied the growing wealth of 
the vast near-to-life scientific world. The man 
of high ideals in education to-day, must be an 
investigator, he must know how to think for 
himself in the realm of scientific research. 

The ideal of the multifold types of education is 
as comprehensive as are the enterprises of the 
Commonwealth, and in the words of the old 



Education the American Passion 167 

Bishop Comenius, it is to train generally all who 
are born men for all which is human (he might 
have added women also). At one of our oldest 
universities where, in the thought of one of the 
early educators, the object was *'to make his 
soul," where every boy was supposed to take the 
same studies in order to claim at the end of his 
course his A. B. degree, there was said to be 
oflFered in a recent year but one subject, English 
composition, required for all students; if a youth 
should try to take all the courses offered by this 
institution, it has been estimated that he would 
need to live in college for two hundred years. 

The educational ideal has been tremendously 
popularized and its former academic character 
has changed through the knowledge and appHca- 
tion of the natural sciences to a practical end. 
Actual life is the end and aim, and the Hfe to-day 
rather than Hfe in the Middle Ages. There is a 
general belief among the people that the idea of 
Professor Agassiz, that a speciality is the back- 
bone of an education, was a sane one. It is the 
feeling that a man becomes competently edu- 
cated by knowing how to do well some one 
thing. 

An educational policy that would be popular 
in an EngHsh institution hke Eton or Oxford, 



i68 American Ideals 

would find itself sailing very slowly against a 
full stream of industrial modernity in America, 
and quite against the tide of public opinion 
which says: "You must teach my boys and 
girls something practical, something they can 
use in their future vocations; I want * bread and 
butter' studies first, then if there is time they 
can indulge in a bit of philosophy or language." 
To the American there must be no cut-ofF be- 
tween the counting-house and the classroom, 
no drop curtain between the family of the home 
and the family of the college. Education co- 
alesces in life. 

A prominent weekly printed not long ago an 
article on the subject "Culture and Agricul- 
ture," and the plea is made for culture, not in the 
terms of the classics or historic consciousness, 
but in behalf of the ordinary everyday life: 

"But my plea," says the writer, "is for culture in 
colleges, and especially in agriculture colleges. Any 
college has the clue to the way to it. Interest is the 
beginning — any interest. It has been noticed often 
that graduate students who loafed through their 
undergraduate years, woke up in the law school or 
the medical department and worked with interest 
and ability. Why is that? The answer is obvious. 
They saw the relation of law or medicine to their 
life." 



Education the American Passion 169 

The American university is no respecter of 
persons. Ezra Cornell sought to found in 
Ithaca an institution where "any person could 
find instruction in • any study." The motto 
seems to be more and more "no favoritism for 
any study; but to fit the needs of the student 
applying!" It is safe to say that the mind of 
man has not yet conceived subjects related to 
life that are not to-day taught somewhere in 
the schools of the United States. Compre- 
hension rather than limitation has been the 
ideal. The three R's have verily become a 
legion, and twenty-five different subjects are 
now being taught in the public schools of New 
York City. Like the accomodating Hbrarian, 
if he has not got it in stock, the educator will 
hospitably order it by first post. The story is 
told of a very much up-to-date college president 
of "unappeasable energy," who received a call 
at his office from a young man who wished to 
study Choctaw, which vanishing language was 
not in the curriculum. The president is described 
as saying with some regret, "I am sorry that 
we have no department for the teaching of 
Choctaw this morning, but if you will call around 
this afternoon, we will have one organized for 
you." 



170 American Ideals 

At one of the prominent state universities 
in the Middle West, twenty-five students were 
registered during the last college year in the 
subject of horse-shoeing. In a large university 
of multitudinous departments, where the col- 
lege catalogue is almost as bulky as an un- 
abridged dictionary, I was shown about the 
Dairy Department where a variety of work was 
being carried on. A young man leading a 
small calf into the stock-judging lecture room 
attracted my attention; said unwilling calf was 
undergoing various kinds of measurements 
and minute investigation by the student. Upon 
making bold to ask the university meaning of 
this procedure, I was solemnly told by the pro- 
fessor in a perfect matter-of-fact tone that the 
student was "doing original work on the calf." 
This undergraduate, in fact, was writing his 
graduating thesis on the subject of "Calf 
Evolution," and the youth, who was going to be 
an expert dairyman, having weighed, measured, 
and otherwise researched this calf twice daily 
since the animal was born, probably knew more 
(as I was told) about real calf nature than any 
man who had ever studied in this department. 

Our common schools are becoming Garyized, 
our high schools vocationalized, and our colleges 



Education the American Passion 171 

humanized after a fashion that neither the old 
nor new humanists would have quite under- 
stood. The trades of yesterday have become 
the learned professions and callings of to-day. 
Applied science like applied Christianity has 
changed the nation's needs, and with its changed 
requirements there has come a new set of ideals. 
The professor is no longer the dreamy, spectacled 
don, lost in his quiet and delightful speculative 
studies of theories and literary excellence; he is 
to-day forming the new twentieth-century ideal- 
ism as an expert scientific or industrial engi- 
neer, or a government-assisting forester, a land 
expert, a practical mining specialist, or an engi- 
neer of efficiency. 

Schools and departments for business admin- 
istration, for journalism, architecture, household 
and domestic economy, agriculture, scien- 
tific education, and a score of specialties of 
which our forefathers scarcely dreamed in that 
small Mayflower company of forty-one in the 
year 1620, have arisen in the ever-enlarging 
field of modern knowledge. These have helped 
to alter, not only the method of training, but 
also the spirit of American educational ideals. 

Even the older and the traditional subjects 
like law, theology, medicine, and the philoso- 



172 American Ideals 

phies, have come under the new scientific 
generahzing processes, and if they have lost 
in the realm of the theoretic, the mystical, and 
the literary, they have gained immensely in the 
field of the useful, the accurate, and the im- 
mediately serviceable. 

There are some who hold that in this transfer 
from the deductive to the inductive methods of 
education, we have become more and not less 
ideal, that research and scientific investigations 
of the laboratory, the field and the counting- 
house, are often "with no ulterior practical 
purpose." We are told that the vast number 
of expert teachers of the new learning, who are 
spending laborious days and nights in devoted 
experimentation, with thought of nought save 
their interest in new discovery, are helping to 
leaven and idealize the whole lump of modern 
scientific learning. We hear that there is as 
much real idealism in the effort to make a 
perfect cow as in creating a winged Mercury. 
This new scientific idealism, is in any case one 
of the most significant and far-reaching in- 
fluences to be noted on the educational horizon 
in any part of the world at the present time. 
Its influence has long since left America to 
sweep, by the power of its example, around 



Education the American Passion 173 

the entire earth. The Egyptian government 
students surveying the banks of the Nile, the 
young East Indian agriculturists carrying out 
the principles of knowledge and method learned 
in our state universities, as well as the Far East- 
ern youth, in China especially, who are carrying 
back the models of our scientific training for 
their new systems of education, have all felt 
the wave of this practical pulsation. 

But with all our successes in the education 
that fits the hand to the work of the moment, 
there have come insidious dangers in the realm 
of the student's ideas of mental and spiritual 
progress. He has gained much over his fore- 
fathers in the machinery of effective educational 
action; he has lost something in the region of his 
soul. 

Educational ideals, like all other things in the 
higher realm of men's thinking, cling about 
personahties quite as truly as they associate 
themselves with principles, and in the school 
realm it is the personality of the teacher that 
marks the turning-point in all education. In 
one of the Hindu sacred books it is asked, "Who 
are the keepers of the city ? " The answer comes 
"The teachers!" The crossroads of school 
existence are at a point where education that 



174 American Ideals 

trains the youth for making a hving joins with 
the path that trains the student for making a 
Ufe. There is a difference between greatness 
in engineering and greatness that is of the 
mind, the character, and the spirit. True edu- 
cation comes from within out — not vice versa. 
Education should have an ideal and a system 
for the development of trained and skilful arti- 
sans; it should not forget its ideals and its 
system for the development of the individual 
as a man. 

The educators of America are already realiz- 
ing that their task is only half done when they 
have vocationalized their system; it now must 
be spiritualized. The school must be the 
temple of the spirit, or its books, its useful 
curricula, and highly developed play, jangle 
hopelessly in a confused utilitarian universe. 
Every child cometh from afar. He brings with 
him the infinitude of possibilities in the realm of 
fellowship, reverence, imitation, purity, and the 
romance of youth. Pitiful is the teacher who 
forgets spiritual culture and who leaves that 
ministry to the clergyman. He has lost his 
main chance at changing life who fails to re- 
member the individual in the crowd. It is the 
faculty that makes or mars the university, and 



Education the American Passion 175 

Dr. Gilman of Johns Hopkins was right when he 
sought for his institution "men, not buildings!" 
The teacher who has not become internally 
conscious of the deeper needs of the student as 
a human being fails even when he seems to suc- 
ceed, and his pupils will bear the mark of his 
incompetency. 

I attended recently a meeting of schoolmas- 
ters where one of the teachers spoke on the topic, 
*'The Damage We Do as Teachers.'' He quoted 
the dialogue between Socrates and Protagoras 
in which Socrates says in substance that it is a 
serious thing when one goes to get instruction. 
You can go to the market and buy a fish, he 
contends, and take it home with you. If you 
find it is bad, you can throw it away; but if you 
go to get instruction and find after you get it 
that it is bad, you can't get rid of it. You 
must keep it, since it has become a real part of 
you. 

There is a growing consensus of opinion that 
much of the failure of our schools and colleges 
is due to the failure of the teacher, a failure often 
to grasp with vividness and with earnestness 
his distinctive task. 

The ideals of the teacher are twofold. First 
of all it is the teacher's vocation to see that the 



176 American Ideals 

student works in the realm of ideas as well as 
within the region of his vocational tools. The 
average American boy comes up to the prepara- 
tory school, flabby in power of will, procrastinat- 
ing, inaccurate, frequently with slovenly habits, 
and a past master in the fine art of wasting time. 
The school and the college are handicapped at 
the start in their material. They are weakened 
by the weakness of moral and spiritual discipline 
in the American home. "I expect nothing of 
the next generation of students," said one of our 
well-known but somewhat despairful public 
men, ** for they have no patience and no persever- 



ance.*' 



The modern youth in America is inclined to 
be easy going; he has not learned to obey. It 
is no small favor to such an youth to make him 
work under discipline for four or eight years — a 
discipline that inures him to courage and promp- 
titude in attacking a hard job. 

English schools accomplish much in this line 
and English schoolmasters should be studied 
by American teachers. In the preparatory and 
public schools especially, there is no babying, 
no soft measures — the boy is supposed to learn 
endurance, fortitude, and the power to overcome 
obstacles. It is this ability of the masters of 



Education the American Passion 177 

these EngHsh schools Hke Winchester and 
Rugby to inculcate a spirit of disregard for 
circumstances and untoward environment, that 
has connected British colonization with the 
playing-grounds and the "forms" of public-school 
boys in the British Empire. It is this spirit 
that Henry Newbolt has caught so perfectly in 
his poem "Vitae Lampada" when he says: 

And it's not for the sake of a ribboned coat 
Or the selfish hope of a season's fame, 

But his Captain's hand on his shoulder smote 
" Play up! Play up! and play the game! " 

One hears at Eton the story of Doctor Keate, 
the famous head master, who one day met a 
new boy in the schoolyard, and finding the lad 
cryingy asked him what was the matter. "I am 
cold," said the boy; at which the master an- 
swered, *'You must put up with cold, sir! 
This is no girl's school." Fifteen years later 
this boy was with the Third Dragoons in India 
charging at the Sikhs, the best fighting men of 
the Khalsa. The Sikhs were entrenched in a 
well-nigh impregnable position, and as the order 
came to charge, the old Eton boy turned to his 
superior officer, who was also a graduate of the 
school on the Thames, and said, **As old Keate 
would say, this is no girl's school!" with which 



178 American Ideals 

remark he rode to his death in that memorable 
charge of the battle of Sobraon that gave Lahore 
to England. 

There is certain truth in the saying of an 
American educator that the direct product of 
English schools is a little indifferent Latin verse, 
but the by-products are the men who run the 
Indian Empire. As a Frenchman put it, 
** culture is what remains after we have forgotten 
what we have learned." In England this spirit 
that never says die is not as thoroughly asso- 
ciated with intellectual endeavor in the schools 
as it might be, but as a force for a fortification 
of the will and as a guide for a teaching ministry, 
it commands tremendous respect. After all, 
what is education ? Is it not the training of the 
will, to help it choose right voluntarily and 
without exterior compulsion, making the will 
proficient in work? Of what good is scientific 
training or any other kind of training for the 
mind that does not somehow impart with its 
precepts the faculty that gets these precepts 
accompHshed? Education is merely a pretty 
idealism or a passing commercialism without the 
**will push." Thomas Huxley gave an immortal 
definition of education when he called it the 
abihty to make a man do the thing he ought to 



Education the American Passion 179 

do when it ought to be done, whether he felt 
Hke doing it or not. 

It is a grave question as to whether our ideals 
for teaching and training students are intellec- 
tually high enough. Are we preparing in the 
midst of all of our utilitarian study for the far- 
sighted and vast hungry intellectual wants that 
are already beginning to show themselves in the 
wake of our prodigious industrial prosperity? 
We are already seeing the turning of the tide 
in the attitude of our self-made men of yesterday, 
who are eager to send their sons and daughters 
to college to be the educated people of to-morrow. 
Are we considering our obligations to raise them 
up to citizenship, filled with lofty ideahsm for the 
new civilization of the New Freedom which, 
although now it seems to be a distant spectre 
with the din of European battle in our ears, 
is surely coming in the new bright day of larger 
knowledge and more perfect intellectual and 
spiritual vision! 

Our elective systems and great free trade 
routes of education, our early specializing upon 
things that happen to be the most locally in- 
teresting to students, our extending areas of 
play and social amusement, with the multitude 
of novelties and fads, ranging through the whole 



i8o American Ideals 

gamut from hygiene and Montessori to eugenics 
and schools for automobiling — all these combine 
to make school life in the words of a certain 
educator "just one big game" — a contemporary 
dust storm of innumerable activities if we forget 
the larger emphasis upon the training of the 
mind and the will. We give the impression of 
school days and college a trivial and jovial note. 
The very repetition of the phrase "college boy" 
is to smile. We make it a four years' sentimental 
journey before the real work of life begins. But 
college life is not preparation merely; it is life. 
The careers of our boys begin and get their per- 
manent bent during these days. The youth 
obtains his mental and moral habits in prepara- 
tory school and in the university. His student 
enthusiasms, his love of traditions, and that 
which he calls his college spirit, may be lost later 
through his geographical or vocational business 
of hfe, but his habits persist. Was it not the 
Duke of Wellington who said, "Habit is ten 
times nature".? Habits of persistent work 
should be encouraged and insisted upon in the 
daily routine, not left to spasmodic dashes just 
previous to examination, because these habits 
persist in the man and are carried over into 
every phase of his succeeding life. 



Education the American Passion i8i 

In the United States we have only two insti- 
tutions that really give disciplinarian training 
for hard work equal to that which the youth is 
to experience in the competitive struggles in the 
world. These two institutions are the Military 
and Naval Academies at West Point and Annap- 
olis. 

Some years ago I was the guest of the late 
Col. Charles Larned, Dean of the West Point 
faculty, a man who could teach his specialty 
and also could perceive the significance of that 
specialty as a means for training the will to 
work. We were speaking of this matter of in- 
tellectual work as we sat looking at that match- 
less discipline revealed in the West Point dress 
parade on Sunday afternoon, when Colonel 
Larned said, *We are tightening up the curricu- 
lum. The boys have too much spare time. Our 
root principle of education here is to keep the 
men every minute at something.^'' I had just 
been talking with a cadet who told me that 
even before this "tightening" in the curriculum 
he had less than an hour a day to himself. 

Such discipline, to be sure, weeds out the weak 
and the undesirable. It makes education the 
survival of the fittest in the realm of the self- 
reUant will. Not every boy can endure physi- 



i82 American Ideals 

cally or mentally the strain of such discipline, 
but where one boy is lost to education by over- 
work, a score fall out by reason of easy-going 
habits, by undue indulgence, or by doing noth- 
ing. Bismarck said that one third of Germany's 
students dropped out of the race because of 
dissipation, one third by reason of overwork, 
while the other third ruled Germany. In the 
United States we find to-day no such percentage 
of students failing because of overwork. Even 
the college jibes against " grinds'' and "book 
sharks" are passing into desuetude because of 
the absence of examples. As I recall my own 
experience in college, the severe obligation of 
hard study did not impress me, in spite of the 
fact that I was one of the many American youths 
who are obliged to "work their way through 
college," which necessarily subtracts considera- 
ble time from the hours which should be given 
to study. I do not remember any memorable 
struggle to pass examinations, but I do recall 
one or two courses that really left their mark 
upon me because the teacher went upon the 
principle that effort is in itself the vital part in 
education. An educational authority who made 
a considerable study of this matter of required 
work, makes the astounding statement that "the 



Education the American Passion 183 

average amount of work done by an undergradu- 
ate in a course is less than three and a half 
hours a week outside the lecture room; more 
than half the answers from which these results 
are derived came from men who obtained the 
grade of A and B (highest grades)." The vir- 
tually unanimous opinion, based upon observa- 
tion and judgment of men who have closely 
studied this subject in America, is to the eflFect 
that the college graduate, whatever else he 
may gain frorxi his student days, is turned 
out lacking in concentration, seriousness, and 
thoroughness, and only "settling down" as a 
trained and earnest worker when he gets into 
the professional school. 

To instil into the student consciousness the 
sense of hard intellectual effort, the effort with- 
out which there is small joy of achievement, the 
effort that Professor James called "oxygen to the 
lungs of youth" — this is the teacher's task. 

The other all-inclusive and even greater task 
of the teacher is the arousal and development in 
his students of the life of the spirit. 

Prof. Henri Bergson in outlining his philos- 
ophy maintains that philosophy will not be- 
come a serious matter until it has done away 
completely with the method of dogmatic philo- 



184 American Ideals 

sophical systems and has devoted itself to ob- 
servation and experience, "not merely the 
observation and experience of the outer world, 
but of the inner world as well." Professor Berg- 
son also speaks of this inner experience as 
religious feehng, "the sense of not being alone in 
this world, the sense of a relationship between 
the individual and the spiritual source of Hfe." 

It is difficult to use this word "spiritual'' 
as applied to the teacher and his teaching be- 
cause of the connotation the word has received 
through our early association with exercises 
and customs of formal religious training. The 
teacher in America, moreover, has been as- 
sisted in a measure to omit his responsibility 
to the spiritual side of student life by the laws 
of the land. These laws are nowhere more 
strictly upheld than in their prohibition of any 
religious teaching in connection with the public- 
school program. Not even is it permitted to 
study the book generally conceded to be the 
most universally accepted model of English, 
the book which, more than any other literature, 
has shaped the Hfe and character of the great 
men of the world. As a consequence the Bible 
is an undiscovered literature for the average 
modern student. As one college president 



Education the American Passion 185 

put it, the teacher must leave his reHgion in the 
coatroom with his overcoat and rubbers, while 
the students are left to drink of the water of 
life outside of the classroom from sanitary 
drinking cups. 

This is especially unfortunate, not only be- 
cause it relieves the teacher, already weighed 
down with many tasks of lesser importance, 
from the feeling of responsibility for the deeper 
life of the student; but it also prevents the 
teacher from becoming a vital interpreter for 
our youth between science and religion. Al- 
though science has now gained the educational 
field, it is questionable whether in its rigid 
experimentation, its cold logic and bigotry oft- 
times, it is more to be desired as a means of 
interpreting the inner life than was its oppo- 
nent, dogmatic theology, or its medieval fore- 
runner, philosophical speculation. The teacher's 
opportunity and in some respects his most 
divine task lies in the presentation, through his 
own personality and teaching, of the essential 
truths of the spiritual world. 

A teacher of Columbia University has said 
that this task signifies '^the falling in love with 
imaginary things and living in dreams." Ba- 
con's phrase as applied to the teacher is: "one 



1 86 American Ideals 

whose mind moves in charity, and turns upon 
the poles of truth/' William James, when 
speaking at one time to teachers, quoted Touch- 
stone's question, "Hast any philosophy in thee. 
Shepherd?" Continuing, Professor James said 
that a man with no philosophy in him is the 
most inauspicious and unprofitable of all social 
mates. It was Dr. Francis Peabody who main- 
tained that the most difficult thing an American 
student could do would be to go through college 
and keep his soul alive, while a graduate of one 
of our New England universities has made 
confession as follows: "We shall be bound 
together only by digging deeper into our own 
spiritual selves and discovering that true kin- 
ship with the deeper selves of others." 

It is this rich inner spiritual life of the teacher, 
this utter devotion to Truth, that most capti- 
vates students and carries them past the teacher 
to the thing taught. Pity the instructor whose 
students stop with him! Pity the investigator 
who cannot impart to his learners the ideal of 
his power! I knew of a teacher in a West- 
ern university whose lecture-room was always 
crowded with eager young men. Quite often 
these youths would break into spontaneous and 
sincere applause at the end of his lecture. A 



Education the American Passion 187 

few years ago I met this professor as he was 
coming out from his classroom. He was Hke 
one of other days who came down from the 
mountain with the skin of his face shining: his 
countenance was fairly radiant by the passage 
of the spirit that had gone out of him. The 
spiritual side of youth, its rich feeling, its nat- 
ural seriousness, its depth of religious possibil- 
ity, its ever-present ideaHsm, had reflected and 
taken possession of this teacher. He taught by 
what he felt and what he was, as well as by 
what he knew. One student described him 
thus, "I don't remember anything he said, but 
I remember him.'' From one hundred college 
graduates who were asked the chief benefit re- 
ceived from their college or university course, 
eighty-nine placed first in their reply the in- 
fluence of one or more teachers. 

There is a true sense in which the teachers in 
our schools are the best idealizing element in the 
United States to-day. As a rule they are char- 
acterized by extraordinary self-forgetfulness, 
and there is no small scorning of delights and 
living laborious days. No one of them who has 
really the right to this term teacher has been 
without the sensation of imparting this spiritual 
quaHty to his students, and this has kept him 



1 88 American Ideals 

alive. It has buoyed him up and given him the 
assurance, as one professor has said, that time 
is on his side. Although the nation has been 
slow to recognize the inherent greatness of 
schoolmastering in this country, as compared 
with the attitude of the people in Europe and 
in Japan, there are signs of awakening to the 
realization that the scholar and the investigator, 
who rank with the nobles of the earth, should 
be given opportunity of the highest and widest 
scope to fulfil their ideal mission. That the 
profession of the teacher has received a new 
standing in the United States in the person of 
Woodrow Wilson, our "Schoolmaster Presi- 
dent," is past denial. 

The word "veritas" may be written across 
the shields of our colleges, or it may be carved 
in the marble and granite of great laboratories; 
it may be worked upon the fraternal emblems 
of our student societies; it may be studied for 
its metaphysical and ethical qualities in the de- 
partments of philosophy, or it may be preached 
about in college chapels; but if it is not incor- 
porated and vitally embodied in the deep, ear- 
nest spiritual life of the teacher who goes daily 
in and out before his pupils, it usually fails to 
take permanent hold of the student's inner life. 



Education the American Passion 189 

Truth indeed is the hand by which men take 
hold of God, but the hand is invisible until it is 
revealed by one who has already clasped it. The 
question of education is at heart a spiritual 
question, the question first of all of the quality 
of the teacher, who himself is spiritual, who has 
seen the gleam of ideal Truth. Like one who 
was called "Great Teacher," he succeeds, not 
by carrying a shining light, but by being one. 



CHAPTER VII 
IDEALS IN RELIGION 

To love God and make one's self loved by Him, to 
love one's neighbors and to make one's self loved by 
them — this is morality and religion; in both the one 
and the other, love is everything — end, beginning, 
and middle. 

JOUBERT. 



CHAPTER VII 

IDEALS IN RELIGION 

In the course of a recent conversation with an 
editorial writer of wide experience and perspec- 
tive, relative to ideals and the forces with which 
to accomplish them, I asked, "What do you 
think of the church as a present-day agency in 
behalf of religious ideals?" "The church?" 
said he with unfeigned surprise, "it is futile — 
its power is virtually gone. It cannot rein- 
state itself in its present form. The only great 
moulding forces to-day in America are the news- 
papers and the banks, and these are either too 
self-centred or too thoroughly controlled from 
outside to be able to meet the deeper considera- 
tions and emergencies of the nation." 

From this opinion many will differ. It will 
be called, and justly so, we believe, the view of 
an extremist who was not thoroughly aware of 
the tremendously vital work the church is 
doing in the United States against many odds, 
and in a period of decided transition from the old 

193 



194 American Ideals 

forms to those more nearly consonant with the 
Hfe of a changed repubhc. But while this opin- 
ion is not usually so broadly and nakedly stated, 
it is more generally accepted, unconsciously if 
not consciously, among a large circle of American 
men of aflPairs, than we sometimes appreciate. 
The inadequacy of the church is especially felt 
when the question is raised whether the Chris- 
tian faith is indispensable as a saving force or 
as an adequate requirement for personal guid- 
ance. Hardly a month passes that some of the 
magazines fail to publish articles by writers who 
take substantially the position that the church 
has collapsed as a means for imparting dynamics 
to the thoughtful and influential classes in the 
United States. 

One finds, indeed, though not so commonly 
save in special coteries in the large cities, a 
class of ultra-liberals with more or less extreme 
socialistic tendencies, who speak of the inade- 
quacy of religion in general much as one would 
refer to the exploded subject of sea gold or witch 
burning — something too utterly old-fashioned 
and out-of-date to merit even thoughtful con- 
sideration. Even the younger clergy in certain 
sections reveal not only a disbelief in the old 
forms of theology and the ** chains of creeds" as 



Ideals in Religion 195 

Whittier called them, but if one may judge by 
the things that engage their enthusiastic atten- 
tion, they have lost considerable of their depend- 
ence upon the religion of our forefathers as a 
means for spiritual and supernatural regeneration 
of the individual. A Southern bishop not long 
ago characterized a certain young clergyman in 
his diocese as preaching somewhat as follows: 
"Dearly beloved! You must repent — as it 
were, and be converted — in a measure; or be 
damned — to a certain extent.'* 

Outside of the circle of persons immediately 
engaged in strictly ** church work," or hsted 
among the professional and official religionists, 
the tendency is to regard formalized religious 
faith as exemplified in the Protestant, Catholic, 
or Jewish orders in church, cathedral, or syna- 
gogue, as good enough for those people who 
want it, but not vitally necessary for the average 
enterprising American on his busy way to suc- 
cess, and each year less prone to demonstrate his 
religious ideals by either ecclesiastical or emo- 
tional exercises, far less in the form of dogma. 
The tendency is to pour out idealism rather in 
the various forms of public service and the 
activities associated with family existence — 
devotion to friends, charity, and standards of 



196 American Ideals 

moral rectitude, without associating these with 
any particularly religious meaning. The second 
commandment of neighborhness has become 
more popular as an ideal than the first great 
commandment of godliness. In a sense the 
American has exchanged the doctrine of his 
fathers for a principle of practical conduct which 
he finds to-day the best policy, which is decid- 
edly ethical but not consciously religious. 

The average citizen will tell you that religion 
is by no means non-existent in America, and his 
explanation resembles the statement of a certain 
college president, who said on behalf of his 
university, which had been criticised for some 
irreligious or liberal tendencies, that there 
never was a time when the men of his institution 
were more deeply reHgious than at the present 
moment, even if they talked less about it than 
did the men of a former generation. 

One also hears frequently that it is not a 
question of the universahty of the existence 
of religious ideals in America at present which 
is of chief concern, but rather the mode of 
their expression. A new set of accessories are 
needed more truly in keeping with the modern 
mood. There is less need of rules of prohibition 
as to what a man must or must not do to 



Ideals in Religion 197 

be a Christian, and more need of a man exhibit- 
ing throughout the whole texture of his life 
the spirit of Jesus. We demand a different 
stage scenery to fit our twentieth-century relig- 
ious drama to that which was the accom- 
paniment of our fathers' faith. Where the 
men of the last generation said *' doctrine/' we 
say ** service." Where they talked about the 
future and this Hfe as a preparatory period sim- 
ply for another world awaiting the soul with 
variegated rewards and punishments, we talk 
about the present, and are chiefly interested in 
making the world of the moment the best possi- 
ble for every one, getting out of it all that we 
can with comparatively little concern or thought 
for another life, regarding which it is quite gen- 
erally conceded we have little or no authoritative 
evidence or experience to guide us to safe con- 
clusions. In other words, the religion of the 
present is quite disengaged from the divine 
path of theological doctrine which was the fore- 
most consideration fifty years ago in America. 
The country no longer languishes under the 
restraint of old fears or is it frightened at being 
shaken over hell, according to the mode of 
Jonathan Edwards. There is a sense of being to 
a large degree the architect of one's own fortune. 



198 American Ideals 

Prejudice, especially religious prejudice, is one 
of the surest marks of failure or weakness. 
Missionary or professional accounts of religion 
are taken with a grain of salt, allowance 
being made for a bias which somewhat negates 
the conclusions. *'In spite of the fact that the 
writer is a missionary," begins a recent review 
of a really great book, "he shows a creditable 
breadth of treatment and a real sympathy with 
other religions." The one hundred and sixty- 
nine different rehgious denominations, by their 
very multiplicity, have thrown suspicion upon 
the unifying and standardizing force of authori- 
tative and official religion. 

There is, moreover, a decided growth in relig- 
ious tolerance in the United States. It would 
be expected by any one who knew the early 
history of America that in the matter of religion 
especially the freedom principle would be opera- 
tive, the New England anachronisms of witch 
burning and more recent heresy trials notwith- 
standing. The Constitution of the country, in 
Article VI, forbids any religious test as a qualifi- 
cation for office, while the first amendment pro- 
hibits Congress from making any law respecting 
an establishment of religion or prohibitory to 
the free exercise thereof. At least three fourths 



Ideals in Religion 199 

of the constitutions of the various states prohibit 
the use of taxpayer's funds given for the support 
of public schools to be used to promote denom- 
inational institutions, or for sectarian instruction 
in the schools of the land. One finds that few 
tenets are more universally and unconsciously 
maintained than that the state as well as the 
individual must keep ''hands off" when it comes 
to the matter of a man's religious convictions. 

As long as the individual's religion does not 
interfere with the manifest and common rights 
of others, or run counter to the laws of the Re- 
public, he is absolutely free to believe or not to 
believe, to worship or not to worship. 

A German in Berlin remarked to me a few 
years ago in speaking of the alHance of students 
to religion in that Empire: "You know, we have 
no heathen in Germany. Every student is a 
member of the State church from early confirma- 
tion in childhood." 

A State church in America, however, that 
would for a moment give the suggestion of in- 
voluntariness in the matters of rehgion, is an 
idea as impossible to conceive at the present 
time as enforced military service, or the prohi- 
bition of liquor drinking or tobacco smoking by 
a simple fiat of the Federal Government. In- 



200 American Ideals 

deed, one of the most common objections pastors 
of churches find presented by parents to the 
baptism of their children in early youth is that 
they, as parents, do not think it is fair to the 
child, or that they have no right to allow the 
child to take such a step in so important a 
matter until he is old enough to choose for him- 
self. In rehgion, as in so many things that in- 
volve individual rights, the person and not the 
state is the norm. In many cases it may even- 
tuate that the child, grown to manhood, loses 
his early inclination to choose a place in the ranks 
of professed religionists — but the theory exists 
quite widely that an unforced selection of reli- 
gion by a youth makes accession to the church 
many times more valuable than a child member 
swept into faith at the required wish of the par- 
ents, and who frequently, when grown, is in- 
clined to lay his religious indifference to an unfair 
advantage taken of him in his boyhood. 

The necessary loosening of the ecclesiastical 
authority of the Catholic church in America, as 
contrasted with its firmer grip upon its mem- 
bership in Spain and Italy particularly, is an 
evidence not only of the wisdom of the Roman 
leadership, but also of the inevitable democracy 
in the spirit and ideal of American religion. The 



Ideals in Religion 201 

famous edict of William of Orange that "con- 
science is God's province/' is still a truism in the 
United States, and the only people who have 
ever dared to oppose it in this land were the 
Puritans of Massachusetts and the Anglicans 
of Virginia, much to the detriment of their mem- 
ory in later generations. 

The promiscuous discussions upon things 
religious exist to-day throughout the country 
as they never existed before. There is not 
the wholesale ridicule either of the Bible or of 
religion that there was in the time of Thomas 
Paine, who said that he had gone through the 
Bible as a woodman would go through a forest 
felling the trees. *^The priests may replant 
them," he said, "but they cannot make them 
grow.*' I was struck recently in walking through 
Times Square to see the popular curb debaters 
thrusting a youth forcibly into the street, the 
leader of the company, who was evidently of 
Jewish extraction, saying in explanation, "This 
man is a disgrace to his race: he has just said 
that he didn't beHeve in God." In a visit a 
few years ago to one of our large universities 
I found seven students enrolled in a Bible class, 
nearly every one of whom professed a different 
stripe of belief. One said he was a free thinker, 



202 American Ideals 

two leaned toward pantheism, there was one 
Jew, one Catholic, and one Christian. The 
last man could not be easily classified, and for 
convenience sake he was called a vegetarian — • 
an aggregation of religious tolerance that should 
cause certain of our forefathers to turn over in 
their graves. 

America is frequently spoken of as a country 
of "isms,'' and one needs only to pick up the 
Saturday newspapers, which show the list of 
services for Sunday worship, to realize the cos- 
mopolitan character of American religion. The 
advance in the matter of conceded liberty to 
every form of faith, recognizing not only a man's 
personal liberty to think for himself, but also 
conceding generously the same privilege to 
another, has been specially evident and rapid 
during the past ten years, since the higher 
criticism and the great social-service movements 
have drawn to themselves so many devoted ad- 
herents, both within and without the churches. 

In spite of the tremendous losses, especially 
in the realm of ethics, which necessarily accrue 
from the omission of any teaching of the coun- 
try's book of religion, and in spite of a multitude 
of attempts to introduce the Bible into the 
public-school system, this ingrained feeling of 



Ideals in Religion 203 

the right of the individual to be taught only 
along such lines as accord with the parent's 
faith, at least until he is old enough to choose 
for himself, has been too strong to admit of the 
introduction of any considerable moral or relig- 
ious teaching in the school curricula. 

Even in social settlements, which are sup- 
ported often largely by church adherents, when 
one asks, "Why do you not give your young 
people some religious instruction?'' the answer 
will be forthcoming, *'We cannot do it because 
of the diversities of the religions represented; 
it would be unfair to teach one faith alone, and 
the conditions of the work make it impossible 
to hold services or to give religious instruction 
in all the beliefs represented by the frequenters 
of the settlement." 

The growing tolerance, which is largely a 
growth of the fair-play principle, is also seen in 
the decrease of acrid theological discussions, 
and in some areas in the indifference altogether 
to matters of theological import. It is not 
necessarily that the people are growing less 
religious, but they are certainly becoming less 
interested in the forms in which the religion of 
the last generation were encrusted. Many of 
us can remember how our own fathers became 



204 American Ideals 

red in the face in their Sunday after-dinner 
discussions of theology, and were quite willing 
to brand men of different faith as semi-infidels, 
even going so far as to establish a kind of un- 
conscious weekday boycott, in rural communi- 
ties, of the merchants and artisans who were not 
fortunate enough to be able to *' believe right'* 
or to "be sound'' in their views, which meant 
usually tobelieve as the religious censors believed. 
It would be difficult to find a woman of the 
present generation speaking as we once heard 
an old lady of our grandmother's period re- 
mark, **I like Mary Smith, but if she joined 
the Methodist church she could never step 
her foot inside my door again!" We recall 
vividly our childish memory of our mother 
blanching before the Sunday discussions of the 
doctrine of free will, predestination, and infant 
baptism, and fairly worrying herself ill in trying 
to invent less belligerent topics of conversation. 
To-day a Jew, a Baptist, and a Christian Scien- 
tist may dwell and dine together in a peace as 
perfect and unruffled as that of a June morning. 
They have learned to emphasize their affirma- 
tions and points of agreement, and to minimize 
their differences to an extent far greater than 
was possible even a generation ago. 



Ideals in Religion 205 

Some would say, "so much the worse for our 
rehgion, and also for our country's tolerance, if 
it is responsible for creating such indifference 
to religion." The greater majority would 
probably agree with the college president who, 
after having made attendance at chapel ex- 
ercises voluntary rather than required, was 
severely criticised by certain religious propa- 
gandists who ironically addressed him, saying, 
"we understand that you have made God an 
elective in your college!" The president re- 
plied, "No, but we understand that He has made 
Himself elective everywhere." Religious toler- 
ance is to-day a commonplace, almost a uni- 
versal, condition in the United States. 

Whether it is due to this growing spirit of 
tolerance, or to the additional emphasis upon 
the secular life of the period, there is a strong 
drift, growing in volume year by year, toward 
associating religion with daily life. The na- 
tional feeHng is increasing that Sunday religion 
and church going are not necessarily marks of 
the kind of religion that is attractive and useful 
in American eyes. The sanctity of Sunday 
has decreasing hold upon the majorities, es- 
pecially the kind of Sunday that is diflFerent 
in spirit from the other six days of the week. 



2o6 American Ideals 

Meanwhile, the elemental needs of the Amer- 
ican heart are changeless through the years, and 
the country that has always held personal and 
national righteousness in its deepest thought 
and as its loftiest ideal, coincident with true 
worth and achievement of any andevery sort, will 
not long go religionless. Indeed the American 
temperament cannot, if it would, eliminate God 
and the soul, with all that these represent in our 
composite civilization. As a people we are 
always somewhere near the mountain of re- 
ligious and spiritual vision, despite the fact that 
the American will usually stoutly deny that 
this is his first interest in life. 

When one gets out of the cities into the coun- 
try and the smaller towns (where one sees 
religious tendencies as all other tendencies 
freer from the obstructing media of competitive 
materialism and abnormal cosmopolitan in- 
fluences, and where one also sees the real nature 
of the country reflected most truly), the church 
bulks larger as an institution; it is still the 
place where the majority of the people find the 
centre of their social life as well as the fountain 
of their spiritual interests. Even here, how- 
ever, if one examines the motives of church 
going and church allegiance, one will find as 



Ideals in Religion 207 

guiding principles the force of habit, public 
opinion, " respectability,'' and the sense that 
somehow, in a way that people do not exactly 
stop to define, the organization of the church 
stands for an element of communal good which 
children and families can ill afford to be with- 
out. The loyalty to sect is much stronger 
outside the cities, and there is a less noticeable 
tendency to make service an ideal for the upHft 
of the community. It is doubtful whether the 
spiritual life of these churches flows much 
higher than in the cities; one reason for so 
thinking resides in the fact that a large number 
of the rural population moving so rapidly to 
the large centres fail to ally themselves with 
city churches, but rather seem to regard the 
new environment as a welcome opportunity 
for release from the rehgious bonds which have 
held them all too loosely in their deepest desires 
and interests. 

Notwithstanding these apparent signs of 
indifference to church affiliations, the religious 
ideal is confessedly one of the easiest ideals with 
which to interest Americans, especially when 
it is clothed in the right sort of language, and 
concerns itself, not with external technicalities 
of doctrine and prohibition, but with the ele- 



2o8 American Ideals 

mental relationships and realities of everyday 
life. There are scores of ways by which this 
rehgious feeling is moved to the point of w^or- 
ship of "Something not ourselves.'' 

The university man, for example, reflects the 
nation's characteristics in this direction quite 
accurately. You will often see in a college 
fraternity a group of students, more or less 
athletically inclined, standing about a piano on 
a Sunday afternoon, or on any evening sub- 
sequent to the evening meal, singing college 
airs, while the ragtime musician of the frater- 
nity pounds out his variations in accordance 
with his peculiar art. Slowly the sounds melt 
downward toward the plantation melodies until 
they frequently reach a deep emotional note 
in the singing of the college Alma Mater. The 
bystander noticed the change as this last song 
was sung in one of these fraternities, and the 
sentiment appealed to him as not being a 
thousand miles removed from religious feeling 
as it welled up in the voices of the singers. 
Upon asking one of the men later about his sing- 
ing he said, "You know, it's funny, but when 
we get to that last song, it does something to me 
way down deep." Some one has said that a 
college man's songs and yells are his prayers. 



Ideals in Religion 209 

We have seen a group of men in a city club, 
certainly not notable for its religious atmo- 
sphere, so stirred by the singing of the ballad 
"Oh, Friend of Mine" by a member of an opera 
company that if some one at its close had 
said "Let us pray!" the crowd would have 
bowed its head with no great surprise. After 
a darkey quartette in a big labor meeting had 
finished singing the old Southern melody with 
its plaintive strain, "The Lambs Are Callin', 
Shepherd Feed Thy Sheep " — one man was over- 
heard to say, "It wouldn't be hard to have an 
evangelistic meeting right here and now." All 
of which, goes to show that emotional feeling 
and religious sentiment flow closely together in 
the American temperament, and that the church 
of to-day which substitutes intellectual ad- 
dresses and lectures upon everything from poli- 
tics to war problems, leaving out the great mov- 
ing appeals to the human heart, is not moving 
nearer but farther away from the deep longings 
of the American masses. 

Arguments to prove the religiosity of Ameri- 
cans are needless. It is ours by heritage and 
by nature. In every stage of the development 
of the United States we have not been without 
thought regarding the expression of this idealism 



2IO American Ideals 

in some form or other. Sometimes, alas, it has 
seemed very much Hke bigotry, again a great 
tide of evangelism has swept the land, and at 
another period it has come to the surface in a 
nation-wide eruption of honesty and moral pur- 
posefulness or renovation. This ideal has always 
seemed as natural as it has been needful in 
the United States, both for the reinforcement of 
our faltering purposes, the inspiring afresh to 
personal achievement of character, and also as 
the medium in which the people might hear the 
Voice of a higher and invisible power. 

Some would say that socialism has now be- 
come the religion of a great number. To others 
church buildings reveal the inclination to wor- 
shipful surroundings with elaborate architec- 
ture and ritual. To many another religion is 
synonymous with philanthropy, and to others it 
signifies the dropping of old creeds and the taking 
up of new ones so varied that even their names 
would make necessary a new dictionary to ex- 
plain their tenets and their titles. There is 
probably no limit to be placed upon the hetero- 
geneous expression which this religious motive 
is capable of taking in a nation made up of so 
many diverse forces, and representing so many 
strains of racial and national ideas and natures 



Ideals in Religion 211 

released in an atmosphere of carefully guarded 
religious freedom. 

These mingled ideals and their methods of 
fulfilment may be grouped under two heads: 

First, those that aim at the ideal of a new 
social organism as the surest means of "saving" 
the people and the state — a variety of large 
and comprehensive socialism — finding its arena 
in multiplied efforts at betterment in restrictive 
or reform legislation, and in multifold schemes of 
economic and political readjustment. It is a 
rehgion of humanity whose watchword is, 
"Change the conditions of life, and you will get 
a world in which the dwellers will find satis- 
factory environment making for their peace and 
prosperity." 

Second, there are those ideals which have for 
a longer time been present in the American 
consciousness, and which aim not so much at 
society as at the man himself. They are repre- 
sented by the church and also by many outside 
the church, and their insistence, differing with 
times and localities, has been upon the belief 
that the salvation of the social organism hinges 
upon the reconstructed and regenerated individ- 
ual. The man, rather than the method, is 
placed in the foreground. The sin of the per- 



212 American Ideals 

sonal human heart is considered more important 
to attend than the sin of the nation. Its slogan 
is, "Change the heart! Efface the wrong in the 
individual, especially the wish for wrong; give 
him a right temper, a right desire and disposition, 
and you will perforce, by the process of indirec- 
tion, make the nation right." Those holding 
this ideal maintain that any other emphasis is a 
temporizing and a palliative only, that drives 
the unscotched evil of the units of the common- 
wealth into other forms of social and corporate 
unrighteousness. 

In other words, the religious ideaHsm of 
America is fairly divided at present between 
what we may call social service, or sociaUsm in a 
large catholic sense, saving the world by the 
strong forces of environment and philanthropy, 
and Christianity as represented primarily in the 
Gospel of Christ, which attaches the hopes of a 
new order to the focussing of attention upon the 
mind and heart and soul of the individual, 
attending first of all to Christian character 
rather than to the manufacture of uplifting 
surroundings. 

In the conflict of religious ideals in the United 
States the present victory seems to lie with the 
apostles of the service idea. In our philanthropy 



Ideals in Religion 213 

we have outstripped and amazed the world. 
While other nations have been stunned by dis- 
aster and famine and the persecution of weaker 
races, America has started a subscription paper 
and has raised trainloads and shiploads of sup- 
plies and succor for suffering and oppressed 
humanity, even while other nations are reading 
the news of the catastrophe. One needs only 
to recall the opening of the American heart at 
the time of such events as the Armenian massa- 
cres, the famines in India, the Galveston and 
San Francisco and Messina calamities, and 
especially the present rising up of the nation's 
generosity in the case of the Belgian and Servian 
sufferers. 

Our *' Foundations" medical, social, political, 
peace, and educational, are almost staggering, 
not only in their number, but in the vast prodi- 
gality of wealth with which they have been 
established. Our pension systems for old sol- 
diers and for new ones, for professors, for miners, 
and of late for civilians and artisans, are being 
estabHshed so rapidly that world almanacs are 
out of date almost before they get into circula- 
tion. The last dozen years have recorded almost 
a continuous unearthing of evil in all sorts and 
kinds of organizations and in well-nigh every 



214 American Ideals 

division of the body politic; social, political, and 
municipal shame of every grade and hue has 
been unearthed and unloaded by the cartload. 
We have investigated and reformed almost 
everything investigable and reformable, rang- 
ing spaciously all the way from insurance com- 
panies to "Sunday" evangelism. Bad tene- 
ments, bad light, bad dance halls, bad sewerage, 
bad medicine, and bad Mormons — all have been 
under the searchHght. We have spent the 
cities' money on commissions to study streets 
and statesmanship and sanitation in Europe. 
We have not neglected our sweatshops and our 
stockyards, our prisons and our poorhouses, 
while the "educational" and "social" and 
"business" drama and melodrama, including 
everything between white slavery and polygamy, 
to the degradation of courts and the captains 
of industry, have been spread before the nation's 
appalled and wincing eyes. The only end to 
this vast nation-wide mania of uplift for analysis 
and reform is the natural ennui and disgust of the 
populace. There is a lull at present in certain 
quarters, for even the American gets tired of his 
own excesses and must have new worlds to con- 
quer. The managers and stockholders of some 
of our most shame-mongering periodicals are 



Ideals in Religion 215 

reported as calling a halt on muckrakers and 
sexual fiction, and even the drama is showing 
signs of passing out of unwholesome topics into a 
cleaner air. The ideal, however, of saving society 
by social revolution and publicity is still running 
strong in the nation^s consciousness. It is a pe- 
riod of social regeneration, and nothing secular 
or familiar to the Hght of common day is aUen 
to it. 

All to what end? Does a thoughtful glance 
at the results of this highly specialized and so- 
cialized ideal in our modern civilization enspirit 
us to further advances along this line, or does it 
suggest more deliberate consideration relative 
to means for the renovation and uplifting of the 
modern state .^ 

Does Germany, for example, with the cleanest 
streets of any city in the world, confessedly with 
the best municipal and educational system, 
especially with its educational propaganda for 
the industrial classes, encourage us in the con- 
tinuation of secular religion? Does Germany, 
to whom we have gone to school in the varied 
arts of beautification and perfection of environ- 
ments, of street cleaning, of care for defective 
children, of old-age pensions and of model tene- 
ment houses, and a score of other advances in 



2i6 American Ideals 

state and school and home — does Germany give 
us hope for saving ourselves and our country 
through model changes in the social organism? 
Does she not possess all these externalities of 
regeneration to a degree of perfection that we or 
any other nation can hardly expect to equal or 
surpass? Yet when the real crisis for showing 
the power and capacity of national ideals in 
morals or religion occurs, in the real needs of 
humanity when idealism is driven from its 
hidden places, this socialized state tears up 
treaties like "scraps of paper,*' she disregards the 
international safeguards of nations, the only 
ropes by which the world's civilization can be 
bound together with hope in moments of crisis; 
she sweeps through neutral unbelligerent na- 
tions, carrying deadly and inhuman destruction 
to lives and property, blighting with torturing 
breath the most sacred sanctions of family and 
home. This nation, which has grown great 
through her attention to the outward details of 
twentieth-century civilization, seems to lose both 
her head and her heart when her selfish interests 
are at stake; she throws a shell upon peaceful 
sleeping hamlets by night, she poisons with 
death-agonizing gases those she may not kill 
otherwise; then, as it would seem, in a premedi- 



Ideals in Religion 217 

tated ideal of fright fulness and moral unrestraint 
she places the capstone on the arch of her ruth- 
less and life-destroying regime by casting tor- 
pedoes at ships loaded with defenceless women 
and little children, standing apart and listening 
unresponsive to the anguished shrieks of the 
drowning, 



"Just as if Jesus had never lived. 
As if He had never died." 



Is it not proof, tragic beyond the reaches of 
the imagination, that social and highly de- 
veloped environmental councils of perfection, 
as nearly complete as anywhere on the face of 
the earth, are as powerless as cobwebs to stay 
the elemental passions of the untamed and un- 
emancipated human heart? 

We ask has Christianity collapsed in this 
spectacle spread before our eyes in this most 
deadly of all wars of the world? Is it only 
left for us to say resignedly, 

"Evil has won 
In the horrid feud of ages with the throne. 
Evil stands on the neck of good, and rules the world 
alone." 



2i8 American Ideals 

Do we as Christians despair of Christianity 
because of scenes and conditions Hke these? 

The very question is a travesty on words. It is 
not Christianity which has collapsed, for the 
Christian ethic or the Christian spirit have no 
more to do with the informing and the bringing 
to fruition of these baneful results than the 
inquisitorial burning of martyrs had to do with 
the healing, tolerant spirit of the Man of Galilee. 
In the words of Teutonic idealism itself, these 
events are the hallmark of a Napoleonic and 
not a Christian regime, the practical evidence 
before the eyes of all men of a religion that 
makes no pretence at beating "its swords into 
plowshares," but has accepted hate and might 
and the religion of valor in its place, the polar 
antithesis of every principle laid down by the 
ethic of Jesus. It is the ideal of steel and iron, 
crushing and trampling into dust the loftiest 
hopes of the spirit and the soul of man. 

If there was ever a visible and consummate 
proof of the saying of a great scientist who was 
once asked about the "failure of Christianity," 
and answered, "The failure of Christianity.? I 
have never yet seen Christianity tried," — it 
would seem to be here. Amid all the heart- 
break of these days, if there is any such thing 



Ideals in Religion 219 

still resident on earth as that which Gladstone 
once called, "A double dose of original sin," 
this is a notable example of it. 

Yet we do not need to go abroad to discover 
the demolition of ideals that play only on the 
surface of social organization but fail to reach 
the roots of human nature, ideals that are the 
resultant merely of secular and ethical na- 
tionalism. At the enormous expense of money 
and press notices and a great expenditure of 
legislative debai:e and legislation, we pass inter- 
state and various kinds of federal laws, aiming 
at the restriction of evil-doing among railroad 
officials, punishing often beyond reason and 
justice the great carriers of the nation for their 
mistakes which are as great as their achieve- 
ments. Then before the ink is fairly dry on the 
statute books, new railroad scandals larger 
perhaps than any that have yet appeared reveal 
themselves in unlooked-for directions, with new 
forms of chicanery and official corruption, and 
widows and mothers from Portland to New 
Haven are bereft of their savings, which have 
gone to fill the deficits of railroad companies, 
some of whose officials are among our much- 
lauded philanthropists and apostles of the social- 
izing gospel. 



220 American Ideals 

Is there not need to appreciate with new 
candor, not simply the inadequacy of exter- 
nalism as a religion, but also that such ideals 
are far indeed from the teaching of the Founder 
of the religious faith under whose banner our 
country was inaugurated ? This Christian ideal 
is aimed, not first at the body politic, but at 
the individual man. It places its stamp, to be 
sure, upon the command to serve and to minister 
to our fellowmen. It would be an anachro- 
nism of Christian ideals that would advocate 
the passing by on the other side of contempo- 
rary Samaritans, saying, **Be ye warmed and 
clothed,'' but doing nothing to assist in the 
process. But even Samaritan tending, accord- 
ing to the principles laid down and acted on by 
Christ, is not the first or the central ideal of the 
Christian religion. The first great command- 
ment is the love of man to God, which has been 
translated as the Hfe of God in the soul of man, 
and this commandment came before the second, 
not only in Biblical sequence, but in the entire 
New Testament emphasis; it comes before it 
in life, in our twentieth-century life, if the second 
commandment is to be fully served. 

Matthew Arnold said that it was by the 
"spirit and the method of Jesus," and in no other 



Ideals in Religion 221 

way, that religion is to be made permanent 
m the world. If Christianity is to have a fair 
trial, if this spirit and method of Jesus is to bear 
any weight whatsoever upon the lives of men, 
it must be the individual man rather than his 
circumstances upon which we must rivet at- 
tention. The man is the maker of his circum- 
stances, and the circumstances have never truly 
made or decided the course of great manhood. 

It has been pointed out that pauperism was 
more common in the first century than it is 
to-day, far more common, yet the Founder of 
the Christian faith neither organized nor ad- 
vocated reforms for pauperism; He left no such 
system of poor laws as we find even in the old 
Jewish histories of the Old Testament. No one 
who has travelled in Eastern countries could 
possibly get the impression that there was no 
need at present, as in the first century, for atten- 
tion to sanitation and hygiene. Yet the early 
founders of Christianity gave the matter, as far 
as we know, little of their regard, in spite of 
the fact that as far back as the time of Moses, 
fourteen centuries previous, they had the ex- 
ample of laws of sanitation and all kinds of 
bodily purifications as matters of legal and 
religious significance. No one can maintain 



222 American Ideals 

that the silence of the New Testament relative 
to these matters can be urged on the strength of 
their being unknown subjects or topics of incon- 
siderable importance to the people or the age. 
Muhammad, contrariwise, recognized the need 
of ceaseless ablutions, and made his laws 
of bathing an inseparable preparation for 
prayer. 

But with the intuitive and certain concen- 
tration of great men, we find Christ sweeping by 
the externalisms of his race, in both secular and 
rehgious things alike, to strike at what was 
to him evidently the core of religion. It was 
this: 

"Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! 
For ye cleanse the outside of the cup, and of the 
platter, but within they are full from extortions and 
excess. Thou blind Pharisee, cleanse first the inside 
of the cup and of the platter, that the outside there- 
of may become clean also." 

It was good men before good measures. It 
seems a slower process, yet the precepts of our 
national faith correspond with the intuitive 
good sense of a vast multitude of Americans 
when they enjoin us that we get on faster in 
the end toward great religious ideals by giving 



Ideals in Religion 223 

our attention first to making men, then laws, 
and good bodily environment in order. "These 
ought ye to have done, and not to have left the 
other undone." Given good men and we must 
by inherent necessity of natural law have good 
laws, good schools, and harmonious cooperation 
between classes. That all the advanced laws, 
be they relative to tariff and government or to 
rum or land tax or communism, are nerveless 
and inadequate for good civilization in the 
hands of bad men as administrators is a truism, 
but it has not become sufficiently patent to 
guide us in our acts. 

We have left at the side a mighty principle 
in our great and sensible religion, and have said, 
contrary to its injunction, ^' Feedthe man, culture 
him, give him good morals, and if there is any 
time left cultivate his soul!" We have reversed 
the process of our religion. To change a man's 
clothes and even to fill his stomach without 
changing his mind and the innermost ideals of 
his nature is the veriest acme of "poking the 
fire from the top." It is to lose the true leverage 
on the things that make the real difference in 
human nature. It is to put the foreground in 
the background of national progress. 

The spiritual man is the chief hope of the 



224 American Ideals 

moral, intellectual, or physically healthy and 
happy man. In religion the official arbiter 
is the spiritual consciousness of the individual, 
as in science it is the intellectual consciousness. 
Dr. Lyman Abbott once said, "Christ did not 
begin with the bottom of the man and work up 
to the top, he began with the top of the man 
and worked down toward the bottom." This 
was also the method of Socrates: "All good and 
evil," the old Greek said, "whether in the body 
or in human nature, originate in the soul and 
overflow from thence, as from the head into 
the eye. And, therefore, if the head and body 
are to be well, you must begin by curing the 
soul: that is the first thing." 

The Christian ethic and gospel, if it can once 
get tried, is the epitome of the highest religious 
idealism — an idealism that draws a man's spirit 
from above to the vision of his own profitable 
individual perfection, a perfection that is worked 
out through the stimulus of the vision of God. 
This ideal has been in the background of 
American civilization for a long time, but there 
was never a period when it needed a more vig- 
orous restatement. Emerson's whole message 
gathers around the idea that the institution is 
but the lengthened shadow of a man. That 



Ideals in Religion 225 

church and that devoted pastor and all those 
everywhere who have refrained from prostituting 
the high message aimed at a renewed, reverential, 
and divine manhood, to the merely temporary 
expedients of a socialized and non-spiritual 
opportunism — these are the nation's bulwark 
of power. 

Count Okuma in speaking of the politics of 
his nation said to me, "The great need in Japan 
to-day is to spiritualize our politics." Likewise 
in America, there is upon us even now the mo- 
ment when not only our country but the nations 
of the world bid us gather up our broken idols 
and half dreams of social and political progress, 
not abandoning the new and helpful order of 
service, but reinspiring it, breathing through it 
the true spirit of the Founder of the religion 
which has not really lost amongst us individ- 
ual or national respect for its reality and power. 



CHAPTER VIII 
ATTITUDE TOWARD THE IMMIGRANT 

The bulk of the Americans don't get as yet any 
real sense of his portentous multitude. 

H. G. Wells. 



CHAPTER VIII 
ATTITUDE TOWARD THE IMMIGRANT 

The present European war and its subsequent 
results in the national and social mobility of the 
nations of the world bring to our grave atten- 
tion the ideals America holds relative to the 
10,500,000 immigrants who have landed in the 
United States since the opening of the twentieth 
century, and to the future attitude we shall take 
regarding this vast flood of alien power and 
possibility. Of these enormous accessions, added 
so quickly to the lower strata of our social life, 
less than 15 per cent, had $50 between them and 
starvation when they reached our shores. Four 
out of every five have no trade, and more than 
seven million of the peoples of Slav, Latin, and 
Asiatic blood are coagulated in crowded indus- 
trial centres where the traditional ideals of 
European life, in many cases the antitheses of 
those of America, are left to germinate almost 
untouched save by the incitements of the labor 
agitator. Only to consider, however superfici- 
229 



230 American Ideals 

ally, the fact that at present the male workers of 
foreign parentage outnumber the workers of 
native parentage, and that this flood of popula- 
tion eclipses our native-born birth rate, is to 
suggest the enormity of our problem in Ameri- 
canizing these members of fifty-six different 
immigrant nationalities. 

The questions these figures arouse are almost 
legion. There are those that involve education, 
safeguarding of womanhood and childhood, re- 
spect and obedience to law, naturalization and 
citizenship, foreign government subsidies, class 
legislation, exclusion by government, and a 
score of theories of service and betterment, some 
of which are in successful operation, but which 
as a whole are lacking in coherence and in unity 
to a common goal. The problem might natu- 
rally lead men Hke Mr. H. G. Wells, who take a 
hurried glance at these congeries of peoples and 
opinions regarding them, to say, *'I could not 
make them understand the apprehension with 
which this huge dilution of the American people 
with profoundly ignorant foreign peasants 
filled me." 

We must consider this problem in the light 
of our past experience as well as with our eyes on 
the present and the future. 



Attitude Toward the Immigrant 231 

Since the year 1845 there has been proceeding 
a migration to the United States far beyond any- 
thing the world has known since the fifth and 
seventh centuries, when in Europe and Western 
Asia the Slavic and Teutonic tribes migrated to 
the Roman Empire. The migration began even 
as far back as 1820, when the English settlers 
came in comparatively small numbers, about 
20,000 per annum, to the last year when an 
avalanche of 1,000,000 persons landed on our 
hospitable shores. 

The Bureau of Immigration reveals the ad- 
dition of 1,250,000 between the years 1845 and 
1855, from Ireland, while the total Irish immi- 
gration between 1820 and 1909 was 4,218,107, 
a vast Celtic wave in number equal to the entire 
population of Ireland in the year 1909. 

The coming of Germans to America began in 
1852, and in the year 1909 reached a total of 
5,320,312 persons of Teuton stock who looked to 
the New World for their future home. 

Next came the Scandinavians, beginning in 
1856 with a strong current of migration reaching 
in 1909 a total of 1,896,139 souls. 

It was not until 1880 that the stronger tide of 
immigration set in from the Austro-Hungarian 
Monarchy, and in 1882 from Italy and Russia. 



232 American Ideals 

From the year 1890 Central and Southern Eu- 
rope have led the van of these new Americans, 
and their total in 1907 numbered 1,285,000, and 
altogether between the years of 1900 and 1909 
there were 8,000,000 additions to the American 
population from this section of Europe. With 
this latter influx also there came new elements in 
both race and religion, and in some respects 
these peoples have furnished the most intricate 
problems of assimilation. 

Furthermore, there is the record of far greater 
growth by the birth rate than among the native- 
born Americans. In certain states this rate is 
three times that of the dwellers of native stock. 
In the year 1910 more than half of the white 
population of the country was foreign or children 
of foreigners, and in that year we find that 
twice as many offspring were born to foreigners 
as to the native population. If the present rate 
and proportionate addition from the various 
nations of the earth continues, it has been esti- 
mated that in the year 1950 at least three fourths 
of the population of the United States will be of 
foreign extraction. 

At first sight this would seem to mean an 
almost impossible task of Americanization. 
There are large considerations which mitigate 



Attitude Toward the Immigrant 233 

the seeming huge problem of absorption. One 
aid Hes in the fact that with this new prospective 
population of 1950, certainly one half will con- 
sist of the emigration from the United Kingdom, 
Germany, and the Scandinavian countries, and 
the process of assimilating these people of more 
or less kindred interests in religion, and in some 
cases likeness of government and racial tradi- 
tions, is much easier than is the case with some 
of the races of Southern Europe and Asiatic 
lands. Of these latter there will be, according 
to the present ratio of immigration, enormous as 
it seems, but about 20 or 25 per cent, of the total 
incomers. It is also to be remembered that 
the birth rate is declining among the second 
generation of foreigners, and that there is also a 
depletion of the foreign reserve in certain coun- 
tries. The conditions arising as a result of the 
present war no one can surely predict. That 
each of the nations now engaged in the conflict 
will be more ready than perhaps ever before to 
offer inducements to hold their people at home 
to assist in filling up the broken lines of workers 
so hideously shattered by the war we are now 
witnessing seems probable. Even if these people 
of the Old World should come to us in greater 
numbers than ever, those who know best the 



234 American Ideals 

growing needs of this land for labor of all kinds, 
and also recognize the increasing number of 
ameliorating and educative agencies at work to 
care for the stranger within our gates, are not as 
apprehensive of the results as are some of our 
fleeting visitors. 

There is, moreover, the past ability of this 
country to bring this foreign material into new 
adaptation to our institutions and life in a 
manner indubitably rapid and unique. No 
foreigner can quite understand it, and many an 
American does not stop to reason out the matter 
or to explain the suddenness with which the 
leaven of Americanism begins to mold the im- 
migrant when it gets a chance at him in com- 
paratively small groups or individually. The 
story is told of two Irish and English immigrants 
coming into New York Harbor on the Fourth of 
July. When the Englishman remarked to his 
fellow prospective American, *'What is that 
noise we hear?" the Irishman replied, ** We're 
celebratin' the day we licked ye." The atmos- 
phere of public opinion, the newspaper in its 
varied languages, and the willingness of the new- 
comer to be transformed as soon as possible for 
his own good, are all conducive to a quick stamp- 
ing process in the stimulating environment of a 



Attitude Toward the Immigrant 235 

progressive civilization. That the American 
type has become more or less fixed, and that the 
hordes of immigrants have in the past not been 
able to radically or suddenly sweep it out of 
existence, is a reason for the belief that it will 
stand the test of the years ahead with perhaps 
even greater tax upon its powers. 

The dangers, however, are great enough even 
at the best, both to the immigrant himself, be- 
ginning anew with the loosened restraints, 
his national habits and his priest left behind, 
feeling himself often "a tossing atom in a 
seething crowd," and also to the Republic from 
the congested and often unattended masses of 
peasants from Europe thrown into a swarm of 
industrial or mining laborers, losing their guid- 
ing stars of the Old World before they even 
glimpse the orbits around which their new world 
is swinging. 

The hope of a successful solution of this vexed 
problem lies in something more than the "eternal 
vigilance" that passively believes we can some- 
how accomplish the miraculous by our wonderful 
civilization. A great many of the people of 
this country must begin to feel a new and a 
different kind of obligation to the foreigner if 
we are really to succeed in making him what he 



236 American Ideals 

may become in this land of opportunity. It 
means ever-increasingGovernment attention and 
official sympathy in rules and laws executed for 
individuals as well as for a herd at Ellis Island; 
it means a vastly enlarged program of education 
for adults as for children. It involves meeting 
the foreigner at the water's edge and following 
him closely into every state and construction 
camp of his industrial work-a-day world; it 
means more personal attention to his social and 
religious and sentimental nature than we have 
yet even meditated; it means that large numbers 
of our people must give up a life work to the 
study and service needed to prepare these eager 
and often able men and women, whom we do not 
know except under the somewhat demeaning 
title of "immigrant," to take their citizenship 
papers with a new sense of obligation to become 
un-hyphenated and unequivocal adherents to 
their adopted citizenship. 

Surveys and Immigration Commissions and 
Americanization Days and "Civic Rituals'' are 
good, but they will of themselves fail to Ameri- 
canize the foreigner. The two things that are 
imperatively needed at present are new and 
truer beliefs in the character and accomplish- 
ment of the new citizen on the part of native- 



Attitude Toward the Immigrant 237 

born American men and women, and in the 
second place actual workers rather than theo- 
rists about work. 

I quote from a letter written to me by Dr. 
Peter Roberts, one of the men who has pioneered 
much of the splendid service at the port cities, 
and who has also assisted in the preparation of 
the foreigner, even as far back as his homeland 
and embarking point, for the new conditions 
awaiting him: 

The great need as relating to the immigrant is 
that American-born men may understand and fully 
comprehend the meaning of democracy. Prejudice 
against the foreigner is too common, indifference 
to his well-being is prevalent, and in scores of com- 
munities a practical program for the assimilation 
of immigrants is an impossibility because of the pre- 
judice of Americans. To remove this antipathy, to 
convince the native born that the immigrant has 
possibilities if he is only given a chance, is the great 
work that needs to be done to-day in America. 

The second great need is to convince the govern- 
ment of every state where the immigration problem 
is acute, as well as the Federal Government, that it is 
unjust to tax the alien without investing in him 
something that will make him a good citizen of the 
United States. I do not see how patriotic Americans 
who know the need of immigrants can complacently 
contemplate a fund of ten millions of dollars taken 



238 American Ideals 

out of the pockets of poor immigrants coming to 
this country, and not demand that this fund be used 
for the education and the assimilation of the alien. 

A sympathetic effort is also needed to induce aliens 
who have been in the country five or more years to 
become identified with the nation. There is need of 
a modification of the law admitting aliens to natural- 
ization, giving an opportunity to character, amount 
of property accumulated, and record of industrial 
efficiency in any reliable plant to count in the ex- 
amination. It is a mistake to believe that aliens 
seeking entrance into our family are desirable if only 
they can write their names, read English, and know 
something about our Constitution. 

The putting of these ideas and many others 
relative to the foreigner into active operation, in 
some parts of our land at least, gives hope of a 
wider nation-wide service for ahen adults as well 
as for children of foreigners. The work of the 
Educational Alliance for the Jews from Russia, 
Galicia, and Poland is notable by its emphasis 
upon the family life of the immigrants, and also 
by its attention to rehgious instruction, which 
it is a peril to omit when dealing with the aHens. 
The Young Men's Christian Association is 
teaching 30,000 immigrants in classes, and is 
reaching ten times this number through its 
lectures and entertainments. The Association 



Attitude Toward the Immigrant 239 

has also thirteen European secretaries serving 
immigrants in foreign ports, and twelve secre- 
taries are at work with immigrants in the North 
American ports. The enhstment of one thou- 
sand college students, most of them in engineer- 
ing courses in our universities, as volunteer 
teachers and helpers among these newly arrived 
peoples, is also to be credited to the work of the 
Young Men's Christian Associations. 

It is in the large cities especially that Amer- 
ican ideals are most alarmingly threatened by 
the mass of undigested foreign elements. There 
is 72 per cent, of the immigrant population 
now in the cities of our country, drawn there 
largely by the opportunities of industrial work. 
In New York, for example, 58 per cent, of its 
males of voting age were born on foreign soil, 
and only 38 per cent, of this immigrant popula- 
tion is naturalized. In other words, we have as 
our "naturalization problem" in the American 
metropolis 510,702 men who are not held by 
citizenship from the engagement in a score of 
things inimical to good government, if not 
tending toward violent socialism and some- 
thing resembling anarchy if their leadership 
is sufficiently unscrupulous. 

The need of grappling with the problem by the 



240 American Ideals 

forces of an entire city and the success attendant 
upon such unified activity are revealed in the 
excellent work which is now being accomplished 
in the city of Cleveland through the leadership 
of the Cleveland Immigration League, which 
has been the means of bringing into being a 
Municipal Immigration Bureau as a part of 
the Division of Employment in the Department 
of Public Welfare. The Immigration League — 
composed of representatives of the Board of 
Education, public libraries, headworkers of 
settlement houses, superintendents of various 
city missionary societies, secretaries of the 
Young Men^s and Young Women's Christian 
Associations, together with the officers of foreign 
societies, judges and clerks of the courts of 
naturalization, and professors in the local 
universities — took upon itself the ideal, "to 
assist the immigrant to solve his own problem/' 
This League found various agencies doing good 
work along separate and almost entirely inde- 
pendent lines, with no definite program for the 
entire city. Its efforts have been successful in 
increasing by 200 per cent, the attendance in 
the citizenship classes of the **coming Ameri- 
can" in this city where 74.8 per cent, of the 
population are foreign born. In the study of 



Attitude Toward the Immigrant 241 

the question the League found certain condi- 
tions existing in connection with the arrival of 
immigrants at the railroad stations, and in the 
treatment of these people by different organiza- 
tions calling for the cooperation of the municipal 
forces of the city, and in 191 3 the Municipal 
Immigration Bureau was formed and joined 
with the League in five branches of activity. 

Depot work has developed until 12,426 
foreigners have been met in a single year at the 
station and assisted in finding proper location. 
A suggestive hint in connection with the work has 
been the statement of the cab drivers who have 
borne witness that their revenue, largely through 
overcharges to these people, ignorant of our cus- 
toms, has been decreased about 75 per cent. 

The employment work has had the cooperation 
of the State Industrial Commission and main- 
tains a State-Cities Free Labor Exchange, and 
the Municipal Employment Bureau which has 
cared for the foreign labor has been brought into 
connection with the Municipal Civil Service Law. 

A Department of Information and Complaints 
has issued an "Immigrant Guide" of twenty- 
seven pages published in nine foreign languages, 
the demand for which calls for two editions 
totaling 70,000 copies. This department has 



242 American Ideals 

investigated and settled in a single year 887 
cases of complaint against steamship agencies, 
notaries public, private employment bureaus, 
and similar institutions which have preyed upon 
these new citizens. 

In education, where perhaps the greatest ad- 
vance and the strategic point of influence is to 
be found, a plan of cooperation formed in con- 
nection with the Board of Education has brought 
about special training courses for teachers in 
methods of instruction to immigrants and the en- 
largement of the elementary public night schools, 
with an increase in these schools of 44 per cent. 

The opportunities have been increased for 
naturalization through night sessions at the 
clerk's office of naturalization which has meant 
the saving of from $2 to $6 per applicant on 
account of opening the possibilities to apply at 
night rather than lose a day's work. During 
the year 1914, i)574 immigrants applied to this 
agency for their naturalization papers, and 
2,960 certificates of naturalization as diplomas 
were issued to newly naturalized citizens at the 
citizenship receptions. 

Not least important is the course on methods 
held every week in the offices of the Immigration 
Bureau where social workers, together with 



Attitude Toward the Immigrant 243 

those interested in the subject, speak and make 
reports and discuss matters in connection with a 
systematic pubHcity campaign now being carried 
on through the newspapers. 

It is with such agencies which are beginning to 
assist on a large scale the immigrant to under- 
stand the country to which he has joined his 
allegiance, as well as to aid the American to se- 
cure the point of view of the immigrant, that we 
must look for the solution of this large problem. 
An idea of the way in which individuals are de- 
voting virtually a life work to the assistance of 
these people is brought out by the following 
which I quote from a letter from Mr. W. P. 
Waller, who is at present the General Secretary 
of the Young Men's Christian Association in 
Akron, Ohio, and who began his investigation 
and work for the foreigner in the city of Cam- 
bridge, Massachusetts: 

During the last fiscal year we had enrolled 1,525 
scholars. The average age of these men was about 
twenty-five. Over 152 were aided in taking out their 
final citizenship papers, which makes a total of 300 
in the last two years. I find that the men who apply 
for their papers are entirely ignorant of American 
history, the character of our great men, and other 
essential features which are so necessary to be under- 
stood if our nation is to be truly a democratic one. 



244 American Ideals 

On the other hand, I find that every one of them is 
most eager to learn these facts. There is a decidedly 
independent spirit among them, and with the right 
kind of instruction and development of public sym- 
pathy toward them, I am certain that they should 
prove of very great value to the strength of the na- 
tion. The attitude of the American people toward 
the immigrant has been one of indifference, and some- 
times worse than that — an attitude of disdain. We 
have relegated them to live in the worst sections of 
our cities; we have placed upon them the most 
menial labors of our commonwealths. In fact, we 
have disregarded almost all of the laws which we 
know must be obeyed in order to produce clean, 
strong, moral beings. 

To my question to Mr. Waller regarding the 
problem of increasing immigration and its 
dangers, he replied: 

The problem of immigration is an economic one, 
and I believe the economic conditions will control 
the ebb and flow. In any case, America should bear 
its share of the world's burden. 

In relation to what the immigrant has done 
for New England and our country generally I 
quote the following: 

New England is rapidly becoming farmed by 
immigrants. Native Americans left New England 



Attitude Toward the Immigrant 245 

soil practically on the "junk heap/' The Italians, 
Portuguese, and many men from Southeastern 
Europe have taken up the work discarded by Ameri- 
cans and are making grass to grow where weeds 
flourished, trees to bloom where old decayed trunks 
marred the horizon. This speaks volumes for the 
value of the immigrant. If we turn to industry, or 
to our great transcontinental railways, we cannot see 
a single mile of track, a single car, a single train in 
motion, without realizing, if we are thoughtful, that 
in a very large measure the immigrant has made 
possible this great progress by reason of his willing- 
ness to work under conditions that the ordinary 
American workman would refuse to accept. 

Quite apart from our great mass of immigrants 
from Central and Southern Europe, whom we 
consider only as "hewers of wood and drawers of 
water," there is a smaller but most important 
contingent that we should recognize for the sake 
of the artistic values which they bring to us. 

While visiting in old Nuremburg I was watch- 
ing one day a famous wood carver lovingly 
fashioning the wooden draperies on the statue 
of a Madonna. When he had finished the deli- 
cate work, which revealed the developed talent 
of a lifetime of devoted artisanship, he turned 
and said, **You are from America; I have a son 
in America." I asked him what his son was 



246 American Ideals 

doing. "He is working in a furniture factory/' 
said he, "fitting the arms upon chairs. He is 
not happy in that new land fitting arms to chairs 
because he is the son and the grandson and the 
great-grandson of wood carvers in Old Nurem- 
burg." 

The old German's words raised in my mind 
the query, "Are we making the most of our im- 
migrants of artistic inheritance?" In these 
times of specialists and machine-made articles, 
in a period when an immigrant is so rapidly 
converted into a cog in the wheel of our vast 
industrial enterprises, are we not forgetful that 
some of these men, at least, are bringing to us 
the heritage of great talent, which is slowly being 
crushed beneath the wheels of our materiaHstic 
Juggernaut. 

We ask why the old Florentine goldsmiths 
were the greatest in the world, why Bernini has 
never been surpassed as a worker in gold and 
silver.^* These Florentine craftsmen took the 
crude material and, with their own creative 
hands, formed it into the object of their dream. 
They saw not only the beginning but the finished 
product of their hands. It had the effect upon 
them that the finished poem has upon the soul 
and the mind of the poet. Just as truly as the 



Attitude Toward the Immigrant 247 

poet would have found it impossible to have 
created his masterpiece if to him had been the 
privilege of making the first two hnes only- 
while other men added their allotted lines, none 
of them seeing the finished poem as his own, 
likewise the creative soul of the modern work- 
man is scarcely stirred by his piecemeal work; 
It results in machine-made product and an 
ambitionless and machinelike man. 

Not all, to be sure, not indeed even more than 
a small qualitative minority of these thousands 
who annually seek American shores from their 
ancient fatherlands are equipped either by 
their inheritance or training to take the chisel, 
the brush, or the hammer in creative, artistic 
hands. Yet no one has watched that endless 
stream of humanity flowing through the gates 
of Ellis Island almost any day, without dis- 
covering here and there in the dreamy eyes of 
the Jew, the Slav, or the Latin, the sleeping 
capacity of a great artist or a great workman 
along individually constructive lines. That he 
does not at present find opportunity for the 
expression of that which is most truly germane 
to his aptitude and ideals in the heterogeneous 
herding in twentieth-century American indus- 
tries goes without saying. 



248 American Ideals 

The lines of Robert Haven Schauffler, in his 
"Scum of the Earth," may be pondered with 
benefit: 

Mercy for us who dare despise 
Men in whose loins our Honor lies; 
Mothers of men who shall bring to us 
The glory of Titian, the grandson of Huss; 
Children in whose frail arms shall rest 
Prophets and singers and saints of the West. 

Newcomers all from the eastern seas, 

Help us incarnate dreams like these, 

Forget, and forgive, that we did you wrong. 

Help us to father a nation, strong 

In a comradeship of an equal birth. 

In the wealth of the richest bloods of earth. 

In these days when we are meeting these new 
citizens with so many various plans for training, 
is it not worth while to consider the possibilities 
found in this material for a school as yet un- 
heard of, a school in which the results of age-long 
genius of Europe and Asia may be garnered for 
fresh and larger achievements.^ This genius 
would be expressed in forms diverse from that 
in which it was revealed in the Old World; it 
would be adapted naturally to the life and en- 
vironment and institutions of the New World. 



Attitude Toward the Immigrant 249 

To disregard it or to crush it by our constantly 
accelerated processes of industrial activity is as 
certainly to deprive the individual of his prime 
incentive as it is to rob America of one of the 
richest assets to be derived from the stranger en- 
tering our gates. 



CHAPTER IX 
THE SHADOW OF SUCCESS 

I cannot call riches better than the baggage of 
virtue; the Roman word is better, "impedimenta," 
for as the baggage is to an army, so is riches to virtue; 
it cannot be spared, and left behind, but it hindereth 
the march; yea, and the care of it sometimes loseth 
or disturbeth the victory; of great riches there is no 
real use, except it be in the distribution; the rest is 
but conceit. 

Bacon. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE SHADOW OF SUCCESS 

It might seem inopportune to treat of the weak- 
nesses of a nation when the stones of that nation*s 
building are still leaping to find their places 
in the unfinished structure, and while the sha- 
dows of our forefathers are still lying upon our 
path. As it is, however, in the moving, easily- 
changed growth of youth, while his faults and 
foUies are entangled with his virtues, before age 
has given the set to habits, that one finds both 
attraction and possibility; so in national life we 
do well to test the structure material while it is 
still in hand, choosing and refusing as we build. 
Here, as in other phases of American history, 
the secret of her failures lies imbedded in her 
success; her failures are the shadows of her 
success. The hour of prosperity is the hour 
of danger in the United States; it is the hour in 
which to consider such weaknesses as easy-going 
complacency — trusting in a kind of shadowy 
optimism and a blind sense of luck — the in- 
253 



254 American Ideals 

difference to the inner light and the worship of 
contemporaneousness — placing action in the 
room of merit — seeking the wrong goal and be- 
coming proud of the secondary thing — sordid 
ideals of spending — the perils of the vacant 
mind — ideaUzing of pleasure and forgetting the 
finesse of life through the preoccupation of the 
hunt: these are shadows falling across our pres- 
ent-day prosperity. 

The weakness of American idealism gathers 
about those dangers which are incHned to inhere 
in republics where the government is decided 
by majority suffrage. 

Among the most prominent of these national 
inclinations is the tendency to break down the 
respect for law and vested authority; this is 
followed at times by the evasion of the laws of 
the land, providing it can be done safely. As an 
old Pennsylvania farmer put it, **It's all right 
to get the best of the railroad, providing you 
don't get caught at it." It is a trait that re- 
sembles somewhat the Oriental's deceit, which 
in the East is regarded as a virtue and a mark of 
cleverness as long as it works, but is instantly 
despised when it fails to delude. 

It must be recognized, however, that in con- 
sideration of the scale upon which democracy 



The Shadow of Success 255 

is being tried in the United States, a far more 
extensive scale than that upon which repubHcs 
have heretofore existed in any part of the world, 
the faults of indifference and a lack of responsi- 
bihty relative to law and order, though often 
alarming, are not sufficiently widespread or fla- 
grant to make Americans despair of their cure. 
In fact, one only needs to get his fingers dusty a 
bit in the examination of the history even of the 
past fifty years to become convinced that we 
are making progress in the matter of respect for 
law. Some of the things of the dead past are 
the *' Night Riders"; the famous terrorizing 
Ku-Klux Klan; the Western train brigandage, 
led by such outlaws as the notorious Jesse 
James; the "Molly McGuire" conspiracy of 
Pennsylvania; and the fearsome blood feuds of 
Kentucky, where even in the ten years as recent 
as 1880 to 1890 it is stated that fifty members 
of a single family met their death in one unlaw- 
ful murder following another in the trail of 
barbarous revenge. The "Pinkertons," who 
even in the memory of this generation numbered 
one thousand armed men, were called upon by 
different states to protect industries and quell 
disturbances where the arm of the law was then 
inadequate — these and many other examples 



256 American Ideals 

suggestive of a primitive state of authority have 
passed largely into oblivion in the evolution of 
the American Republic into a firmer and more 
truly law-abiding democracy. 

In spite of these encouraging facts, notwith- 
standing the satisfaction that the ruffianlike 
sheriff of twenty-five years ago, with his swash- 
buckler cowboys, is chiefly a reahty in our melo- 
dramatic moving pictures, the germ of disregard 
for law has not been entirely eradicated; the 
snake of sedition, forthat it truly is, has not been 
killed even if it has been scotched; we are not 
out of the woods even though we can see the 
light in the clearing. 

Ex-President Taft, speaking at Yale in 1906, 
said, *'I grieve to say that the administration of 
the criminal law is in nearly all the states of the 
Union a disgrace to our civilization." And 
again in the year 1906, Mr. Taft reiterated his 
convictions in these words before the Pennsyl- 
vania State Bar Association: 

No one can examine the statistics of crime in 
this country and of successful prosecutions without 
realizing that the administration of the criminal law 
is a disgrace to our civilization, and without tracing 
to this condition, as a moving and overwhelming 
cause for them, the horrible lynchings that are com- 



The Shadow of Success 257 

mitted the country over, with all the danger of in- 
justice and exhibition of fiendish cruelty which such 
occurrences involve. 

Not only is this feeling of uncertainty relative 
to the sense of responsible citizenship shared by 
many of the most far-sighted American jurists 
and business men, v^hose position affords op- 
portunities to judge of our failures, but James 
Bryce, than whom no foreigner has been more 
astute or sympathetic in his close scrutiny of 
the governing agencies of the United States, 
in his "American Commonwealth" sums up his 
discussions of our shortcomings with these 
words : 

This inquiry has shown us that of the faults tra- 
ditionally attributed to democracy one only is fairly 
chargeable on the United States; that is to say, is 
manifested there more conspicuously than in the 
constitutional monarchies of Europe. This is the 
disposition to be lax in enforcing laws disliked by 
any large part of the population, to tolerate breaches 
of public order, and to be too indulgent to offenders 
generally. 

While such things as the Thaw, the Becker, 
and the Frank cases, with their long drawn-out 
and uncertain litigation, their often sickening 



258 American Ideals 

detail, confront us; while such abominable acts 
as the murder of Frank still occur; while it 
is still necessary to call out the Government 
troops to quell Colorado mine troubles; while 
gunmen still get their victims with amazing 
frequency in perhaps the best policed city in 
the country, it must be realized that there is 
something inherently weak down below the 
surface of these abnormal expressions of dis- 
order, some failure in the sense of citizenship 
in the general body of which these enormities 
are but the sad symptoms. 

Were further contemporary signs of our 
political unhealthfulness needed we might con- 
sider the inadequacy of the suffrage laws in 
certain of the Gulf States relative to the negro; 
the corruption in the State of Florida in recent 
years by a financier who was confessedly in 
control of certain divisions of the state legisla- 
ture for his personal advantage; the connivance 
of both officials and people in recent matters 
of racing, speculations in stocks, railroads, and 
department stores; in the dead letter condition 
of certain liquor laws, and especially the trav- 
esty of alleged execution of drinking legislation 
in some of the "prohibition states," where the 
very mention of the word "prohibition" is to 



The Shadow of Success 259 

cause a laugh, so inadequate is it thought to be 
to stop by law the sale of spirits. When a 
governor of the Empire State is impeached for 
crooked practices, and when another governor 
is called to make the fight of his political career 
on the plain issue of the enforcement of laws 
that are already on the state statutes regarding 
horse racing and betting, is there not afforded 
evidence somewhat incontrovertible that the 
law is not an authority par excellence in the 
American mind? 

There is also the drift toward a laxity of 
discipline and blundering service in many an 
institution of public character. In our stores 
and on our street conveyances we find a 
lack of respect and careful attention to details 
on the part of overworked employees. In our 
post offices, in our railroad ticket offices, in 
restaurants and hotels, one could pick up a 
volume of testimony and witness to the fact 
that, through hurry or heedlessness or the grow- 
ing sway of professionalism in public and busi- 
ness affairs, the sense of personal responsibility 
is weakened. Europeans are sure to accuse us 
of the trait of being long-suffering to the point of 
weakness, and the newspapers and public 
officials of many a land supposedly less jealous 



26o American Ideals 

of its rights, would be flooded with letters of 
complaint for breaches of service to be expected 
as a matter of course from servants of the people 
in public institutions. 

There is a feeling all too common that it is 
in no wise dishonorable to do the daily task with 
the eye on the clock rather than with a pride 
of workmanship soaring above the feeling of 
"getting home." Men will tell you that it needs 
a stand-up fight to get orders out on time in 
many a business house, and the man is best 
served who makes the most determined and 
unceasing demands for immediacy. A prom- 
inent builder told me recently that he was out 
of pocket hundreds of dollars yearly by reason 
of the necessity of sending back workmen to 
finish incomplete or faulty construction. There 
is a tendency to undertake more work than the 
firm can do well, and this fills the air with a 
constant sense of pushing on to the next job, 
and depending upon the owner to "make a 
kick,'* which he is usually obliged to do if he is 
to receive quid pro quo for his money. It is 
needless to point out the fatal twist in the self- 
respecting sense of responsibility which this 
doing of work so that it will pass, yet not so 
well but that much of it will need doing over. 



The Shadow of Success 261 

gives to the workman. It is making the stand- 
ard of service depend, not upon excellence of 
work, but upon the good nature of Americans. 

That labor organizations have been partially 
responsible for this lack of personal obligation 
in one's work, making an eight-hour day rather 
than a perfect product the norm of their activi- 
ties, is probably true. That the previous grind 
of the sweatshop and the inhuman dominance 
of wealth in vast trusts and huge impersonal 
industrial organizations was the prior cause of 
this sordid emphasis of the trades unions, is 
also true. 

Meanwhile the "dear public" pays the piper 
for the absence in many a phase of our life of 
the consideration due to the average house- 
holder and citizen. There is running through 
the democracy, as a counter to the feeling that 
we are often imposed upon, the idea that a nation 
gets as good government and service as it de- 
serves; anyhow, that we are making our own 
institutions, poHtical as well as private and pub- 
lic; and this satisfaction closes our mouths when 
we would speak out against the cajolery of the 
politician and the vexing incompetency of the 
tradesman. 

Behind this somewhat unconscious sense that 



262 American Ideals 

we can change things if we will, there is a dis- 
inclination in the United States to stir up trouble 
and a not pronounced sympathy with those 
who are too forward in pointing out weaknesses. 
We have in the American a temperament of 
quick emotionaHsm and one that is ready to take 
up with the last and best new thing wherever 
he finds it, moving about without let or hin- 
drance in many spheres of his freedom; but yet 
in respect to the toleration of abuses he is one of 
the most lenient and conservative of persons. 
As a rule he finds it is a safe working policy to 
bear the ills he knows rather than flying to ills 
he knows not of, which may exist quite likely 
on the other side of his protest. He resembles 
his countryman, Josh Billings, who said that if 
when walking in the woods he encountered a 
snake hole, he invariably turned out and went 
some distance around, saying to himself, "That 
hole belongs to that snake." 

In this shunning of disagreeable responsi- 
bility the American is not unlike the China- 
man, who if he drag a drowning man out of the 
water, according to the usage of the land, he 
would be accused quite likely of having tried 
to murder the man, and if he were fortunate 
enough to escape with his head, he would prob- 



The Shadow of Success 263 

ably have to assume the man's future support. 
The dweller in the United States dislikes to 
get into trouble if he can avoid it; hence he 
often takes the easiest way, becoming a first- 
class example of unconcerned, even if pained, 
indifference. Furthermore, has he not the news- 
papers? and is there anything in the heavens 
above, the earth beneath, or the waters under the 
earth that the American newspaper fails to make 
public, and in such a wealth and luxury of detail 
and itemization as to almost relieve the ordi- 
nary individual of duty for the delayed and 
delinquent processes of law and order! 

Another shadow of our American idealism 
is in the region of that good that becomes the 
enemy of the best; I refer to the peace-at-any- 
price talk and activity, especially to the attempt 
to enlist our youth in a kind of anti-enHstment 
sentiment savoring considerably of fanaticism 
if it misses being called by a stronger word. 
While the weakness of the Republic in the 
enforcement of laws is due to the citizen's easy- 
going belief in the democratic order of which 
he feels himself an integral part, this extreme 
advocacy of peace on any terms is a distinct 
foe to the spirit of self-respecting and vibrant 
democracy. It not only smacks of treason to 



264 American Ideals 

the spirit of devotion to law, but it is an egre- 
gious misconception of the condition of advance 
of human nature. It is a blind attempt to 
legislate into being a state or condition which 
must first exist in the human heart, having its 
secret and propelling cause far below all our 
ingenious panaceas. No sane and worthy 
citizen wants anything but peace among the 
nations, as we all want peace between capital 
and labor; but as in the latter case we very 
sensibly recognize the limiting media in which 
industrial peace must be brought about — the 
unregenerate nature of man — in the former 
matter we go about our Utopian peace tinker- 
ing as though evil and wrong-doing were ghosts 
of a distant generation, long since laid by what 
we are pleased to call modern civilization. 

As a sad matter of fact, while it has accom- 
plished much in changing and reforming the 
outside of the nature of the twentieth-century 
man, civilization has not changed radically the 
inside of him, and unfortunately, or sometimes 
fortunately, it is the inner man that determines 
the existence of peace or war. It is not to sup- 
port or to approve of an evil to acknowledge its 
existence, but to fail to face the fact that hu- 
manity writes its history in one long story of 



The Shadow of Success 265 

struggle, not unmixed in any long period with 
bloodshed, is both to be ignorant of the past, 
and what is more to the point just now, it is to 
neglect to recognize the constitution of mankind 
in its present reactions. The fight against sin 
and wrong, as we see it, is the most common act 
of humanity and its trail runs red across all the 
life of men. All literature and all civilization 
we know or care about is colored by it both in its 
sacred and secular phases. It was by the 
memory of their battles that Pericles and De- 
mosthenes adjured the Athenians. Did not 
Horace boast that he had been a soldier, non 
sine gloria ? Milton in one of his most sublime 
sonnets said, "Peace hath her victories no less 
renowned than war." Our very hymns and 
sacred chants are war songs, and the Book "our 
mothers read" is filled with injunctions to "fight 
the good fight of faith," and to follow those 
heroes who sailed through bloody seas to win 
the prize. One of the most popular hymns of 
our American youth is, "The Son of God Goes 
Forth to War." We may dream peace and pray 
devoutly for peace on earth and good will be- 
tween men, but at the same time we must not 
shut our eyes to facts as they are, nor would we 
be sensible peacemakers if we deluded ourselves 



266 American Ideals 

into thinking that we can sweep into the light 
of a new and younger day, before the shadows of 
conflict and belief in war have been driven from 
the inner shrines of human thinking. 

If we are at all impressed by recent events we 
will find it difficult to evade the fact that in the 
hearts of a good number of the races of men 
there is still a considerable of that commodity 
originally known as moral depravity, however 
optimistically we may feel and act in our peace 
conferences. As between ourselves as individ- 
uals, so between ourselves as nations, certain 
things will yield to arbitration and measures more 
or less peaceful; but there are other things deeply 
rooted in the obstinacy of the human heart, 
that are as difficult to settle without recourse to 
physical pressure in our nation, where men are 
supposed to see alike, as they are to adjudicate 
between nations with whom ideals vary widely, 
and add to the barriers to peace. 

Why did we not arbitrate our differences with 
England in the period of the War of the Revolu- 
tion ? Because we could not ; human nature was 
against us. England could not arbitrate with 
Germany in 1914; human nature on both sides 
and on all sides was too strong for them, and 
until we get considerable closer to the millen- 



The Shadow of Success 267 

nium than we are at present, we must count on 
this doughty and often most perverse antagonist 
to large unselfish purposes, expressed in the 
little word that Henry Drummond once said had 
wandered out of theology into Hfe, the word of 
three burning letters — S-I-N. The shadow of 
this small word still looms dark and ominous 
across the attempted successes of mankind, and 
they reckon ill who forget it and try to railroad 
us into havens of world peace. 

I am reminded of an incident told of a devoted 
missionary who had experienced indifferent 
success in winning the heathen natives of a dis- 
tant island to his faith, when one day he chanced 
upon the passage, "Give to every man that 
asketh of thee; and of him that taketh away thy 
goods, ask them not again." As a last resort, 
the good missionary tried this method of preach- 
ing. The natives came to his home admiring 
his pictures and his books and his furniture, and 
seeing his willingness, carried them all away 
until the poor man had virtually nothing left. 
He then sat down in his house and waited. The 
next day the removers of the goods returned 
bringing them all back and, according to the 
account, this was the beginning of a great re- 
vival in the obdurate heathen community. A 



268 American Ideals 

seemingly strong argument for peace-at-any- 
price ! The only reason that this method of mis- 
sionary propaganda has not become general in 
difficult heathen sections, lies in the sequel of this 
incident, which was told me in the region of this 
event. The missionary, according to the report, 
removed to another field and tried the same thing, 
but in this case the heathen kept the furniture. 

There is no conclusive evidence that volun- 
tary self-sacrifice and unprotected rights are as 
yet current or common commodities among 
nations wanting property belonging to others. 
In a conversation with a British member of the 
Government of India, as we sat comfortably at 
the dinner of some foreign guests in Delhi, I 
proceeded to ask the stock question, whether 
England would ever give back India to the East 
Indian? The EngUshman replied with a know- 
ing wink, "Of course we shall give India back. 
Didn't we give back America to you?" 

Far be it from me to join the ranks of the 
jingoists or to delude myself into thinking that 
in our long history of peace-loving policies any 
large portion of the inhabitants of these United 
States have lost their pristine loyalty and devo- 
tion to their highest sense of patriotism. Even 
our youth are old enough to remember the sight 



The Shadow of Success 269 

of thousands of peace-desiring men ready to 
rush to arms at the insult to our flag, crowding 
**the road of death as to a festival/' I would 
be the last to advocate the exchange of our vic- 
tories of peace in the realm of industrial advance 
for a nation of ironclads and ever-absorbing at- 
tention upon fortresses and militarism, which 
breed the madness of the ruffian and the bully 
among nations and men. 

But I would add my voice against those who 
would set before our nation a soft peace-at-any- 
price ideal, for this means when it is grown a 
weak passivity in the presence of wrong and 
oppression. It means the loss of power to have a 
part in the great neutral counsels of mankind; 
it is also a travesty on any great religion. Out- 
side the comparatively small and uninfluential 
Eastern mystics and medieval saints who have 
solved the problem of peace in the world by giv- 
ing it up and leaving the earth for the monastery, 
outside the visionaries and the sentimentalists, 
the high-minded religious souls of the world 
have recognized the inevitable necessity of 
fighting evil with weapons best suited to its 
demolition, since they have discerned it as the 
causal agency of unhappiness and the enemy of 
every advance of man to durable peace. The 



270 American Ideals 

Christian Scriptures in their wide sweep and 
plain injunction give warrant for the use at 
times of the weapons of the children of "dark- 
ness" when the issue is drawn against the down- 
treading of the weak and the innocent, and the 
ruthless violation of homes and firesides. That 
there are times when war has a greatness of its 
own, and when to die fighting is better than to 
live safe, when for the truth we ought to die, is 
the truism of both history and religion. 

America is too great a nation to be satisfied 
with peace that involves dishonor, or a laying 
down of weapons against unrighteousness. 
Such peace would choke her. It would stifle 
the very breath of her lofty and democratic 
independence for which our fathers died. There 
are things far more corrosive and crushing than 
war for a principle. There are things more poi- 
soning to a nation than poisoned gas; one of 
them is breathing a poisoned patriotism, buying 
peace with a shattered self-respect. There is a 
fighting spirit all shining with honor, that in the 
high phrase of the English poet. 

Blameless in victory stands 
* * * 

Shines with immaculate hands; 
Stains not peace with a scar. 



The Shadow of Success 271 

We want untarnished peace, and when one 
distant day, universal peace *' shall lie like a 
shaft of light across the lands, and like a line 
of beams athwart the sea," we are disposed to 
believe that our large free land will have added 
some ray to that brightness, not by refusing a 
hand over the darkness to the oppressed, but 
by her vaUant championship of the Rights of 
Man, and by saving others, saving herself, 
keeping in Hfe or in death the sovereign integrity 
of her own soul. 

Another shadow casting itself more or less 
ominously over our remarkable successes is the 
money delusion, as represented in the tendency 
to display and extravagant spending. It is 
almost inevitable that the rapid accumulation 
of wealth, united with the excitability and 
the love of the picturesque in the American 
character, should induce among certain portions 
of the population a condition of self-indul- 
gence and the desire to show off in the realm of 
material prosperity. In this inclination toward 
extravagance and striving for effect, the rich 
especially go the Oriental one better. 

In a recent account of a wedding, described 
in the columns of one of the steadiest metro- 
politan newspapers, we are regaled with two 



272 American Ideals 

long columns under such headlines as the fol- 
lowing: 

$500,000 in Gifts at Wedding. 

Bishop officiates before 600. 

Six Hundred of Society Attend. 
Ceremony in Palm Room. 
The Bridal Procession. 
The Wedding Gifts. 

The words standing out in the account of the 
proceedings are "the great estate that extends 
over 4,000 acres," — "emergency dispatchers' of- 
fice" — "fourteen mounted Deputy Sheriffs pa- 
trolled the estate" — "gifts of guests amounting 
to $300,000." The father's wedding gift to his 
son, the account goes on, was a check for 
$200,000. "The bride's cake towered several 
feet in height." Among the splendid presents 
noted were "a superb string of pearls" — "a 
magnificent stomacher of diamonds" — "dia- 
mond sapphire brooch," etc. Then after the 
narration of what the guests and participants 
wore, in words defying translation, we hear 
about the private cars that carried off the couple 
and the glowing description of their summer 
home at the seashore, the denouement consisting 
of a detailed Hst of the "society people" present 



The Shadow of Success 273 

— an inventory resembUng the complete roster of 
the "Social Register/' 

The Arcadian simplicity of John Alden and 
Priscilla would be somewhat jarred by &uch a 
wedding, removing to a distant limbo of misty 
forgetfulness the days of Cotton Mather and 
the era of "plain living and high thinking." The 
democratic nature of this profuse occasion is 
suggested withal by the fact that the daughter 
of a big tobacco merchant weds with the son 
of an old family in Philadelphia, where if any- 
where in the United States blood is revered. 

But what objection should any one have to 
rich people spending their money freely? Does 
it not put gold into circulation? And does it 
not give employment to all sorts of dressmakers, 
flower sellers, and hordes of artisans and work- 
ing folk of various classes? Rich men in a 
community are an asset and inducements are 
justly held out to them, especially by smaller 
cities and towns because of the benefit their 
wealth will bring to the community. 

No sane person can have a quarrel with wealth 
when it is used with a touch of communal or 
unselfish interest. Were it not for the fact that 
money exists in large quantities, many an ideal- 
ist and apostle of art and letters would starve. 



274 American Ideals 

Material is the basis of the larger growing ideal- 
ism of America, and without it there can be 
little hope of progress in a democratic state. 

It is the extravagant and vain and unpro- 
ductive use of wealth, "riches wriggling in 
the grass of inexperience,'* as Clement of Alex- 
andria said two thousand years ago, that forms 
the menace to any country. This employment 
of money on "importunate inutilities" more 
than oflFsets any temporary economic advances 
it may give to a handful of traders or artisans 
by the baneful influence that the display ideal 
exerts on people who do not stop to think. A 
showy and costly wedding occasion in the United 
States is on much the same plane with the 
vast picturesque durbar of an East Indian 
prince, whose resplendent line of gayly and 
richly caparisoned elephants, jeweled carpets, 
and ruby necklaces are a studied game to 
delude the native with exhibitions of grandeur. 
They are both caterers to the cult of the second 
best, they are both representations of demi-god 
worship with the real gods of the higher civiliza- 
tion in the far background. The Indian prince 
uses them to impress the subjects with his 
power of sovereignty over them, as the English 
used the great and carefully planned durbar at 



The Shadow of Success 275 

Delhi, when King George visited India, with 
deUberate purpose of making an indenture 
on the show-loving mind of the native concern- 
ing the ruler*s ability to rule. The difference 
between the English durbar and a flamboyant 
and costly American show in a great marriage 
or a gorgeous society event, is that in one case 
the money is spent with a dehberate purpose 
to deceive the natives, and in the other it is 
an attempt to fool one's self or one's immediate 
friends. The object of the one was the reduc- 
tion of a nation to tractability beneath the 
hand of a governing race; the object of the 
other is to add to the personal vanity and the 
spirit of self-indulgence, which are usually quite 
sufficient before the event. 

The bane of spending in America for physical 
splendor lies in its eff'ect upon the rank and file, 
as well upon the lowered ideals of the rich, since 
the American is dazzled by the display of wealth 
as truly as is the East Indian. When a prom- 
inent man in the public eye pays ^37,000 a year 
for his apartments, as a certain official of the 
government is said to do; when another busi- 
ness man of wealth spends thousands of dollars 
to fit up with costly decorations and furnishings 
brought from abroad a suite of fifteen rooms in 



276 American Ideals 

one of the most expensive hostelries on Fifth 
Avenue, rooms which he seldom uses except for 
show purposes and elaborate dinners to his 
friends; when a score or two of rich families 
spend millions to keep up palatial residences in 
various parts of the country, some of which are 
hardly visited in a year; when a certain lady 
pays ^25,000 merely for the redecoration of her 
hotel apartments, from which she removed in 
less than six months; and when with Hke reck- 
lessness money is poured out like water by the 
old and the nouveau riche alike, to purchase 
things whose values have been inflated by shop- 
keepers and hotel restaurants and automobile 
firms to suit this penchant for the vainglorious 
tastes of the people of wealth — there is certain 
to be a reactive effect upon a naturally imitative 
people. 

It is partly at least because of this example of 
heedlessness or recklessness with money that 
we find the middle class mortgaging their homes 
and their life insurance policies, and loading 
themselves with burdens of debt that only a 
miracle in the turn of Fortune's wheel can ever 
relieve. This lack of true appreciation of the 
meaning of wealth sets up in our country an 
artificial standard for places in which to eat and 



The Shadow of Success 277 

to recreate, for streets in which to dwell, and for 
clothes to wear, that permeates more or less all 
grades of our city life. 

Even the wage-earner receives a fillip from 
this mania of spending and wanting to show 
others that we spend, this lust of display that 
filters down through the various ranks of so- 
ciety. The attempt to appear prosperous is a 
deadly germ in America. Who of us does not 
know clerks who spend a week's wages on a 
theatre and the after exercises thereof, simply 
because the young man is determined that his 
lady may not call him "cheap," or because he 
does not have the nerve to be sensible? 

Our shop girls and working youth in the stores 
and banks dress so well as to make distinctions 
between the poor and well-to-do scarcely recog- 
nizable so far as outward appearances go. A 
whole year's savings goes, often with an easy 
abandon, for the best room at a fashionable 
hotel by the seaside in order that the clerk may 
be able to say, *'I stopped at the Marlborough- 
Blenheim," or "I spent my holiday at Palm 
Beach." 

A man and his wife came from London re- 
cently to reside in New York for business pur- 
poses. I asked them concerning the things 



278 American Ideals 

that first and most deeply impressed them. 
They answered, "the lack of class distinction." 
When I pressed for an answer as to how this 
lack of class distinction revealed itself they said, 
"For example, we go back and forth every day 
in the Broadway subway. We cannot tell the 
class of the people travelling in the subway with 
us each day by their dress or bearing, with the 
exception of the laborer. One of the first things 
that we noted was that every one wore silk 
stockings, which would be an unheard-of ex- 
travagance for the same class of people in 
England." 

This inability of the Englishman to discern 
differences in the strata of our society from out- 
ward appearances is shared by Americans them- 
selves. Recently I was introduced to a woman 
who, by her charming appearance and gracious 
manners and faultless dress, gave all the ap- 
pearance of descent from generations of breeding 
and culture. I was astonished when told that 
she was the daughter of a railroad engineer, 
her brothers were brakemen on the railroad, and 
her mother was a simple ordinary working- 
man's wife. It was also found that the whole 
family had sacrificed themselves far beyond 
their means in order that their pretty daughter 



The Shadow of Success 279 

might have a chance of a marriage in a grade 
above that of her class (not unHke the Chinese 
who bind one daughter's feet in order that she 
may become a **lady" and have the chance of an 
advantageous marriage, even though the family 
wait upon her and sacrifice many of the actual 
necessities of life). 

The result of this attempt at display, in order 
to achieve a stratum of society above them can- 
not be otherwise than detrimental as a rule to 
people's ideals of lasting value and the aims of 
doing good work. Extravagance and ineffi- 
ciency always go hand in hand. Living for 
appearance, whatever the motive, soon breeds 
working for appearance. Where a man's heart 
is, thither his thought and the cunning of his 
hand are inevitably directed. Upon such aspir- 
ants for showy elevation, debts are inclined to 
sit more lightly with every passing year. As 
one young man said, "Why, you know I should 
never have any money if I paid my debts"; or as 
another frequenter of the races said to his friend: 
"Stop at the best hotel always; if you win a lot 
of money, you don't care; if you lose, a little 
more don't count." The man on a comfortable 
salary gets the fever of spending, or his wife 
gets the fever for him, the gregarious influences 



28o American Ideals 

of his set of acquaintances get too strong for his 
power of resistance, and the story is the same 
the world over — mortgages, ** business troubles," 
and overdrafts on bank and on friends. If the 
crash does not come publicly it is sure to come 
privately in the shape of habits of borrowing 
from one to pay another, and the arrival, sooner 
or later, at the "What's-the-use" stage of exist- 
ence, where the "deceitfulness of riches" gets its 
toll in the coin of a man's loss of the sovereign 
possession — self-respect. 

In the words of one of Dickens' characters, 
"Income, one pound; expenditure, one pound, 
no shilHngs, ha' penny: result misery. Income, 
one pound: expenditure, nineteen shillings, 
eleven pence ha' penny: result happiness." 

The display germ that is to-day a simple toy, 
a harmless bit of spending because a man "owes 
it to himself and family," to-morrow is the soul- 
crushing experience of debt that soon grows into 
that monster of irresponsibility and despair, the 
"world-owes-me-a-living" feeling, and this is 
personal suicide. 

It is to the country where still the great ma- 
jority of the people live that we must look for 
the redeeming and steadying factors in this rage 
of spending. It is to the rural districts that we 



The Shadow of Success 281 

must go to find the permanent ideals of the sim- 
ple Hfe still regnant. If it is true that the soul 
of a people lives at home in the country dis- 
tricts, we may not be discouraged for urban 
America. To be in debt in the country in the 
United States is still a disgrace, and the farm 
mortgage is still the thing that is not talked 
about as a meritorious incumbrance. It is in 
the smaller cities, in the Httle towns, and in the 
agricultural caste of America that one finds 
many of the above conditions absolutely re- 
versed, and the pride of not buying unless you 
can "pay down" is one of the commonest char- 
acteristics. 

There is certain to be a reaction from this lust 
of the eyes and the pride of that Hfe that money 
can buy. The metropolis will never rule the 
country in this respect of money recklessness and 
money extravagance. The laws of happiness, 
of experience, and of good sense are all against it. 
The American, even in the cities, is showing signs 
of disgust and boredom over this frenzied use of 
wealth. He is getting out of the city to the 
country home and a little patch of land with 
flowers and vegetables to ** Love's contentment 
more than wealth,'' and even though the place 
be humble and the sacrifice of commuting is 



282 American Ideals 

heavy, it is one of the sure signs of better times 
in this money delusion. People are learning 
that the lure of Broadway becomes less vivid in 
relation to the distance we place between it and 
our calmer, simpler satisfactions. Slowly but cer- 
tainly we are learning that, as Browning would 
say, there is a star that is below Saturn, there are 
some things that are not worth the candle, even 
though they are attractive and bear the dollar 
mark, things that never can compare with 

A simple, guileless, childlike man, 
Content to live where life began. 

The people of America are too great a folk to 
be permanently captured by the thing, however 
splendid, that is second best. The mere empty 
display of wealth is too insignificant as an ideal 
to hold for long the imagination of a people of 
great capacity for the values of more durable 
and dignified satisfaction. America can never 
be a "peacock alley" through and through. 
There are reasons both traditional and inherent 
that prevent. The citizens of the United States 
may be deluded in their transitional evolution 
by the domination of the obvious and by the 
glitter of the jewels in the flashing material 



The Shadow of Success 283 

crown. But they will never be satisfied with a 
part of life, or with an imitation that crumples 
in the hand that grasps it. 

Wu Ting-fang once said to me, speaking of the 
Chinese race, "We are a commonsense people. 
We love peace.'* He drew a pen picture then of 
the dweller in the United States as well as the 
inhabitant of the Middle Kingdom. The vulgar 
display of money is not sensible, and in the end 
it is the enemy to peace, individual as well as 
national. Its results enslave and hamper the 
national spirit which, in Lincoln's phrase, is 
"conceived in liberty.'' It is second-rate; it is 
partial; it is un-American. Therefore, for the 
vast majority, extravagance and waste cannot 
cast their shadows permanently on the ideals of 
the country. 



CHAPTER X 
AN AMERICAN SYMPOSIUM 

But money is only a means; it presupposes a man to 
use it. * * * It is always better policy to learn an 
interest than to make a thousand pounds; for the 
money will soon be spent, or perhaps you may feel no 
joy in spending it; but the interest remains imperish- 
able and ever new — you have thrown down a barrier 
which concealed significance and beauty. The blind 
man has learned to see. The prisoner has opened a 
window in his cell and beholds enchanting prospects, 
he will never again be a prisoner as he was; he can 
watch clouds and changing seasons, ships on the 
river, travellers on the road, and the stars at night; 
happy prisoner! his eyes have broken jail! 

Robert Louis Stevenson. 



CHAPTER X 

AN AMERICAN SYMPOSIUM 

Matthew Arnold in one of his essays in criti- 
cism referred to the difficulty inherent in the 
task one undertakes when he tries "to pull out 
a few more stops" in that powerful but at pres- 
ent somewhat narrow-toned organ, the modern 
EngUshman. "I have always sought," he con- 
tinued, "to stand by myself and to compromise 
others as little as possible." 

Likewise in a book in which the author at- 
tempts to set forth opinions relative to such 
illusive matters as a people's ideals, one would 
hesitate to take upon himself the responsibility 
of standing for any one's opinion other than his 
own. Since, however, my convictions concern- 
ing certain American ideals have been greatly 
strengthened by the witness of a wide circle of 
Americans from various walks of life and from 
diverse sections of the country, I have planned in 
this chapter to present a brief symposium upon 
Americanideals as seen by Americans themselves. 

287 



288 American Ideals 

One hundred men were asked the following 
question: "What in your opinion are the lead- 
ing ideals of the men with whom you most fre- 
quently associate?" 

The following are among the replies received. 
A governor of a large Eastern state said: 

1. Personal code in public service. 

2. A higher education for the masses — to save 
our Democracy. 

3. A rumless nation. 

4. The application of business efficiency to public 
service. 

5. It never pays to be smart — i. e. "to put one 
over" on the other fellow. 

6. Revival of religious belief in men of affairs. 

A mayor in a Middle West city replied: 

1 . An institutional expression of the humanitarian 
philosophy which is distinctive of American thought 
within the last ten years. 

2. Some solution of the problem presented by the 
larger leisure which industrial development has 
brought, with the feeling that upon the use which 
we learn to make of this leisure will depend the 
soundness and sweetness of the development of our 
national life. 

3. The creation of a national philosophy which 
will have the will to justice as a substitute for the 



An American Symposium 289 

will power which has been tried and led us apparently 
to disaster. 

From a college president on the Pacific Coast: 

To leave things better than one found them. 
To alleviate human distress. 
To protect the weak. 
To give each his chance. 

The president of a New York bank answered 
as follows: 

The ideals of the men of whom I see most are 
generally to live helpful lives and to build for pos- 
terity on foundations in which as much of the good 
in past experience is included and as much as possible 
of the bad eliminated. Furthermore, most of the 
men I know are conducting themselves in their 
business life as though they were bearing a great 
rrieasure of public responsibility and had a great 
duty devolving upon them in the way of public serv- 
ice. This, I know, sounds idealistic and Utopian, but 
it is not. It is the truth, as I see it from day to day. 

From the president of the graduating class 
(191 5) at the University of California: 

The men of California are dominated by the great 
Western spirit of freedom. Ours is a land of promise 
and of opportunity. This may sound like real-estate 



290 American Ideals 

advertising, but I assure you it is sincere. Contrary 
to the belief of most of our Eastern brothers, the men 
of Cahfornia have not set up the dollar as their God 
and standard. It is true our boys are inspired by 
the successes of their parents, and each one longs to 
be independent, and to secure enough means to take 
the grind out of work. I think I am right when I 
say that the majority of the seniors who are graduat- 
ing from the eight colleges of our University this 
spring have in mind, 

(i) Achievement in the line in which they have 
specialized. 

(2) Financial success which will make them socially 
and economically independent. 

(3) By no means least because last, I believe that 
we look toward the estabHshment of true, loyal, 
American homes. 

An American playwright says: 

My intimate acquaintanceship is made up largely 
of one class, ideally speaking. Most of the men I 
know are either doing, or trying to do, something 
that will add to the sum total of the world's beauty. 
In other words they are artists of some sort, potential 
or actual. 

A travelling secretary of the College Young 
Men's Christian Associations in the South: 

Certainly one of the ideals of Americans is effi- 
ciency which is rather a broad term, but it means real 



An American Symposium 291 

capacity to do the thing which one has in hand. I 
question very much whether cultural ideals have a 
very large sway in the minds of the great majority 
of the people. I am not a pessimist in any sense, 
yet I do feel keenly that we have elevated the dollar 
into an entirely undeserved place and the man who is 
able to get money has much larger position thrust 
upon him than his capacity really warrants. How- 
ever, I do believe that there is growing in the hearts 
of a great many people in America the belief in what 
might be called a democratic culture; that is, a 
larger cultural life for the whole people. . . . 

One's heart bleeds when he thinks how little we 
really appreciate the sacredness and value of the in- 
dividual person which is a sign of all real Democracy. 
This reveals a weak place in our national life which is 
not peculiar to us — our false valuation of humanity. 
We value men because of position, money, etc., 
whereas we ought to value them for their character 
and for the essence of personahty that lies within 
them. 

I am not at all sure but that straightforwardness 
and the square deal is one of the real ideals of 
America . . . this is about as fine an ideal as 
we could possibly have. 

A prominent magazine editor: 

Our ideals are 

Honesty and integrity. 
Intellectual achievement. 



292 American Ideals 

Beauty in art and music as a solace in life. 
Domestic happiness. 
Service to one's fellows. 

Confidence in the great mission of our Democ- 
racy. 

From a real-estate man: 

It is difficult to define precisely what an ideal is. 
If it mean a standard of taste which one has toward 
masterpieces in every department of human en- 
deavor, then I should reply that tastes differ so widely 
that it will be impossible to answer the question. 

If, on the other hand, by ideal is meant the thought 
of personal achievement which each man has for 
himself, I should say that the chief aspiration of 
most of the men I know is to produce by their life's 
work something of permanent value to the world, 
and to have their names associated or identified with 
that achievement. In other words, to do something 
worth while and to be known by others as doing it. 
What particular things men desire to do are governed 
by their capabilities and temperament. 

If by ideal is meant the kind of personal conduct a 
man would choose for himself, most of the men I 
know desire to so live that they will both satisfy 
their own consciences, and meet all reasonable criti- 
cism of their fellowmen. Most men desire to so live 
that other men will say: "His word is as good as his 
bond." It seems to me that most of the men I know 
prefer to have other men think of them as good 
rather than clever. They may desire tQ have both 



An American Symposium 293 

of these qualifications attributed to them, but would 
prefer the former. 

A New York clergyman says: 

The men with whom I most frequently associate, 
although not constituting a very large number, are 
fairly representive of the rank and conditions of 
American society. In trying to imagine what a 
composite photograph of my circle would reveal, I 
believe that the prevailing ideals would be self- 
reliance — quick action — big results. Education must 
be directed to "practical ends" — how to build a fifty- 
story skyscraper in a year. Along with this a feeling 
of unrest; that "bigness" is not greatness, and that 
life is not expressed entirely in terms of the five 
senses. Witness Booth Tarkington's "The Turmoil"; 
a groping, therefore, toward the spiritual — not to 
say the religious. Social service, literary clubs, 
musical societies, art classes, and free libraries, in- 
dicate a strong tendency even where they are merely 
affectation. 

A physician writes: 

During the past ten years I have observed a de- 
cided rise in the tide of professional self-respect. At 
various physicians' associations and conventions 
there is purposefulness and conviction for greater 
things. The possession of basic principles proved 
by modern research and clinical experience has so 
clarified the minds of the professional leaders that the 



294 American Ideals 

true spirit of the reformer is evident. The ideal 
seems little short of absolute perfection. Fifteen 
years ago it was publicly averred that the mercenary 
spirit dominated the profession. It is my observa- 
tion that this spirit is on the wane. 

A librarian of a New England university: 

The men with whom I associate most are college 
professors. They very seldom talk about their 
ideals. The inner life of men in our generation is 
very much less self-conscious than that of their 
fathers even. I wonder if I can say more of them as a 
whole than that they are chiefly occupied with their 
daily work, with providing for their families, and with 
living up to the standards of their social and profes- 
sional class. In external matters do we not now say 
** Social standards" or "standards of Hving,'' where a 
few years ago men said " ideals ? " Aren't ideals what 
we give the right of way in our daily lives, regardless 
of what we profess? 

A consulting engineer writes: 

The American ideal is activity and energy, readi- 
ness to change, demanding Improvements of living 
conditions, freedom of rule, independence of action, 
and willingness to correct wrong and to see future 
possibilities. 

Development of women is an American Ideal. 
This means more than suffrage. 

Recognition of laborers' rights to participate in 



An American Symposium 295 

profits is an ideal that is coming fast into large rec- 
ognition. Its proper and wide adoption and opera- 
tion would solve the so-called problem of capital vs. 
labor and would probably replace socialism in this 
country. 

Making money is the ideal that is attached to us 
by many foreigners who do not distinguish nor under- 
stand the underlying motives. The fact that an 
American takes the greatest interest and pleasure 
in conducting his business and working out new 
problems makes his progress in inventions, discov- 
eries, new appliances, free from the thought of 
plodding or the sordid making of money; therefore, if 
the American does not get pleasure out of his business, 
he is quite sure to neglect it, and reveals thereby that 
money-making is not his ideal. 

Travel, comprising the desire for knowledge and 
understanding of all other peoples of the world, is 
undoubtedly an American ideal. It has been incul- 
cated possibly by a desire for change of scene. It is 
an expression of the underlying spirit that has formed 
and made the United States of America, and when 
intelligently indulged, it results in the broadening 
of thought and a development of ideals that cannot 
come so easily and readily in any other way. 

Head master of a large school for boys: 

As I meet men to-day, not only those in my own 
profession, but business men — men who are in the 
stress and strain of active business life in our cities — 
I am impressed with the change in ideals as compared 



296 American Ideals 

with those of twenty years ago. It seems to me that 
underneath all the desire to accumulate wealth, 
which is common enough to-day, is a very deep- 
seated desire to be of real service in the world. Only 
a month ago I heard one of the leading business men 
of America tell how he took over a large publishing 
enterprise chiefly because it seemed to him to aflFord 
an opportunity to accomplish some good, as well as 
to make some money. That seems to me typical 
of the ideals of a very large proportion of the better 
and more successful business men of to-day. I am 
quite sure that it is the ideal of men in my own 
profession. 

The editor of a Socialist paper sent to me what 
he considered to be the chief ideals of a dozen 
people with whom he was closely associated: 

Adventure, a free personal life, revolutionary ad- 
justment of social conditions. 

Destruction of established forms of coercion. 

Personal artistic achievement; the achievement of 
a more sane and liberal social life. 

Spread of knowledge concerning economic evolu- 
tion, and increase of eflFort in line with that knowl- 
edge. 

More personal freedom, more self-expression, less 
responsibility. 

Personal artistic achievement, self-knowledge, hap- 
piness in personal relationships. 

Furthering of social revolution. 



An American Symposium 297 

Personal artistic achievements; personal happiness 
in human relations. 

Social fair play; self-expression. 

Discovery in the field of art. 

Personal artistic achievement. 

Service in behalf of artistic freedom and social 
revolution. 

Self-expression; artistic achievement; freedom 
from responsibility. 

Readjustment of economic arrangements. 

The editor who sent these characterizations of 
his friends added this footnote. : 

Reading these over, I realize that they seem very 
much alike. But ! 

A prominent publisher: 

While it is true that wealth and success figure 
conspicuously among many of the men of America, 
I am not inclined to accept these as the controlling 
ideal. Big business, great wealth, and success are 
closely related to the unlimited resources and extent 
of the country; and the men of our country, seeing 
the door of opportunity, knocked persistently until 
it responded. But beneath the surface of these 
material things there are to be found finer concep- 
tions and ideals, freedom, justice, large-heartedness, 
humor, optimism, and an abiding faith in the people. 
Nowhere has the peace ideal met with a finer re- 



298 American Ideals 

sponse than in America, and the men with whom I 
have had the honor to associate impress me as stand- 
ing more for honor and justice than for success and 
wealth. The search for "the more abundant Hfe" is 
more in evidence in America than almost anywhere 
else. Of course, it is only too true that in that 
search gross mistakes have been made, and will be 
made until the end of the chapter. Yet it is marvel- 
lous how the ideal of self-government has entered 
more and more into the life of the American people, 
taking on larger forms as the needs of the people 
demanded it. 

The vice-president of a Boston savings bank: 

Imagination, working with and expressing itself 
in material resources. Morgan was more of an 
idealist and artist in finance than in his collection of 
"objects of art." His satisfaction was in power 
rather than in delight — in owning something that 
others couldn't own, rather than in the beauty of the 
objects themselves. Our captains of industry are 
idealists up to a certain point, for they have vision 
and they create. Who now will rear the structure 
on the foundations they have so magnificently laid.? 

Our poets, novelists, painters, sculptors, archi- 
tects, are moved to the expression of energy rather 
than to the creation of beauty — something that 
satisfies of itself by virtue of its eternal rightness and 
harmony. 

Social and political reform points immediately to 
the amelioration of physical conditions: better 



An American Symposium 299 

housing, higher wages, more comforts, and Increased 
efficiency, honesty in officials, as involving less waste 
of the taxpayer's money. Does reform look for- 
ward also to the release of the human spirit for the 
enjoyment of the "things that are more excellent?" 

We have the materials and the conditions of a 
great civilization, but our civilization is not great. 
What are the ideals, and with whom are they to be 
found, which shall achieve a spiritual end at all com- 
mensurate with the material means? 

A well-known author and traveller: 

The spirit of brotherhood and a thoroughly genuine 
interest in fellowmen. My experience, especially 
in city clubs for men, leads me to conclude that this 
feeling is keener in America than in the countries of 
Europe where I have lived and travelled. I think 
the American man is peculiarly sensitive to the rights 
and feelings of his fellows. 

Keen interest in truly democratic movements and 
factors in social adjustment. I think our men really 
want to be brought into larger and more sympathetic 
participation in the activities of our civilization. 

A really knightly attitude toward women. 

A growing spirit of tolerance in matters of religion 
and social usages and personal habits. 

From a professor in Columbia University: 

My associates are mostly students and teachers. 
The ideal of scholarship, the enlargement of knowl- 



300 American Ideals 

edge, is very powerful with the University professors, 
and perhaps equally powerful is the less definable 
professional ideal — the personal qualities that belong 
to a scholar and a gentleman. Students, too (mine 
are all graduate students), share in these ideals and 
also in the astonishingly powerful ideal of education. 

It seems to me that the faith in education is really 
connected with the growing faith in our power to 
better things — an ideaHsm which glorifies human 
energy. Hence the zeal to make money, to improve 
one*s social station, to get an education, to be of 
service to others. These all rest on a profound faith 
in the power of human energy to create a better 
world. 

With educated women, there is no doubt that the 
ideal of a freer and more variegated life for women 
is nowadays very much alive. I think it has its 
roots in that same confidence in the ability of the 
human being to make the world over. 

A Wall Street financier and vice-president of 
a large trust company: 

I think that the leading ideals of the men with 
whom I associate are in general the ethics of Wall 
Street, where a man's word is of greater value than 
anywhere else in the country. I feel, too, that their 
attitude has become much less provincial than hereto- 
fore, and that often the good of the country, the 
state, and business at large is considered by them 
more than individual profit. 



An American Symposium 301 

A well-known Jewish scientist: 

This question is difficult to answer as it really refers 
to the innermost thoughts of men. What appears 
on the surface may be an inclination toward world 
peace and charity, refinement and culture. I am 
afraid that, however, under the surface, the real mo- 
tives are still selfishness and self-gratification, effi- 
ciency for the purpose of personal success, ease of 
Hfe, and pleasure. I do not think that what goes un- 
der the name of charity is genuine in most instances. 
I find, even among my friends, that they are more 
ready to spend ten dollars on self-gratification than 
one dollar on pubHc welfare from truly altruistic 
motives. 

A schoolmaster said : 

Selecting twelve close friends, representing teach- 
ing, business, law, medicine, the ministry, and farm- 
ing, I discover them to be animated by the following 
ideals: 

Public service without thought of personal gain — 

9 

Thrift— 6 

Personal advancement, per se — 4 

Wealth, that is, the accumulation of money for 
the sake of family or for self — 5 

Generosity, of time and interest, as well as of 
money — 3 

Advancement of the profession as a science — 6 



302 American Ideals 

A farmer in northern New York: 

I do not know as I understand exactly what you 
mean by "ideals/' but the things I am trying to live 
up to are: 

I want to give my boy and my girl as good an edu- 
cation as they can get, for I didn't have the chance 
when I was a boy to study. 

I want to be looked up to in my church and my 
community as a man who pays his debts and whose 
word can be trusted. 

I want my work to be well done. When I shovel a 
path in the snow I try to shovel it wide and clean, 
and when I plow a furrow I try to make it straight 
and deep. 

I want a home free from debt and enough money 
for myself and wife to live on when we can't work no 
more. 

The president of one of the largest life insur- 
ance companies: 

In business — 

To succeed. Success means more than mere 
money; it means the power to advance methods and 
thereby benefit others. 

Socially — 

An utter contempt for "society" as that word is 
usually applied. No especial social program that 
does not aim directly at intellectual quickening and 
social betterment. 



An American Symposium 303 

A lawyer in a large city of the Middle West 
writes : 

I have picked out fifteen men with whom I am closely 
enough acquainted to feel that I can interpret to some 
extent the ideals which seem to me to dominate them. 

1. Wealthy man. Head of large manufacturing 
business. Accumulation of money. Position of 
social and financial power. 

2. Head of large manufacturing business, national 
in scope. Accumulation of money. Personal serv- 
ice to a limited extent. 

3. Minor officer in large corporation. Accumu- 
lation of money. Social position. 

4. Head of moderate-sized local business. Accu- 
mulation of money. Social position. 

5. Assistant to business man just mentioned. 
Accumulation of money. Proper education and 
rearing of family. 

6. Agent working on commission. Accumulation 
of money to spend on personal pleasure. Married, 
but does not want family. 

7. Agent working on commission. Money enough 
to get married. 

8. Travelling man. Accumulation of money for 
realization of high-grade family life. (Wants to be 
able to stay at home.) 

9. Prominent lawyer. Community service, na- 
tionally and locally, to the point of self-sacrifice. 

10. Lawyer. Accumulation of money for per- 
sonal pleasure. 



304 American Ideals 

11. Physician. Money enough to retire from 
practice and go into farming and dairying on a large 
scale. 

1 2. Chief executive of social-service organization. 
Community service, and a happy family life. 

13. Minister. Service. 

14. An old man whose chief aim is to live, and who 
devotes all of his time and money to this one end. 

15. A working man. Money to properly bring 
up and educate his family. 

The ideals given above are what I would call 
" leading.*' Of course, there are less prominent ideals 
in all these cases which are more altruistic. 

The above replies give a somewhat compre- 
hensive idea of the ideals that exist in the minds 
of Americans of w^idely different classes. Space 
V70uld not permit presenting the answers of 
the entire one hundred witnesses as to the 
character of the ideals regnant in America, but 
the following summary of answers of the one 
hundred men who replied is significant. 

"What are the leading ideals of the men with 
whom you most frequently associate?" 

The following ideals were mentioned: 

No. times 
mentioned 

To be of service to one's fellows 46 

To make money for selfish enjoyment or personal 
power 28 



An American Symposium 305 

No. times 
mentioned 

The search for truth and justice, intellectual 
achievement, to contribute to human knowl- 
edge 24 

To provide for a family, domestic happiness, and 

education of children 22 

Efficiency, self-reliance 11 

Honesty, integrity, fair play — the square deal 11 
Confidence in Democracy and its institutions . 9 
To attain reputation and high professional stand- 
ing — i. e., personal ambition 8 

Deeper rehgious life 8 

Tolerance in religious, social, and personal mat- 
ters; greater freedom of the individual . . 8 
Love of beauty (art, music, literature, etc.) 

and the creation of beauty. 6 

Chivalry toward women and protecting of the 

weak 3 

Education of the masses . Z 

Prohibition 2 

The answers summarized in the table just 
given represented the opinions of persons living 
in twenty different states of the Union. The call- 
ings and positions represented by the one hun- 
dred persons answering were as follows: 

Law, Engineering, Medicine, Business (in various 
divisions: Real Estate, Insurance, Advertising, 
Clerks, Agents, Managers, Manufacturers, Trades- 



3o6 American Ideals 

men), Artists, Clergy, Educators, Professors, Col- 
lege Presidents, State Governor, Congressman, 
Librarian, Actor, Poet, City Officials, Secretaries and 
Heads of Social and Religious Societies, Musician, 
Undergraduates, Playwright, Authors, Travellers, 
Scientists, Publishers, Missionaries, Newspapermen 
and Editors, Farmers, Principals of Academies and 
High Schools, Bankers, Miners, a MultimilHonaire, 
and a Travelling Salesman. 

It is possible that the person reading and 
studying the aims suggested by this circle of 
Americans may get the impression that w^e are 
inclined to be unduly optimistic. In order that 
there might be a balanced picture of the idealism 
existing in the minds of the average and rep- 
resentative American citizen, I added another 
question v^hich vs^as also ansv^rered by the same 
one hundred men. This question read as fol- 
lov^s: 

"What do you consider to be the chief points 
of weakness in our contemporary American 
life.?" 

I append some of the answ^ers received. 

From the president of a large college for girls: 

Laxness in honor; slackness of moral fibre when not 
on parade; willingness to shirk the labor of honest 
detail; in a word, a willingness to dodge obligation. 



An American Symposium 307 

Out of this comes our attitude toward law, which is 
no further advanced than a schoolboy's, who plays 
hookey if he can. 

From a New England author: 

Speaking now of my countrymen in general — 
narrowness of vision; self-indulgence; "cheapness of 
soul"; deference to success regardless of how it was 
won; ease in Zion, or rather in its hinterland; 
the Narcissus-like self-contemplation of that poor 
creature the "man in the street"; lack of thorough- 
ness; lack of respect for the intellect; just now a sense 
of world importance without a corresponding sense of 
world responsibility; all this is helped on by a lack 
of an acknowledged moral aristocracy. 

This from a poet : 

Lack of responsibility in public affairs. 

Toleration of dishonesty. 

Want of thoroughness and discipline. 

Complacency with cheap ideals of comfort, luxury, 
and fashion. 

Failure to understand the functions of intellectual 
influences. 

Need of constructive imagination 

A bank examiner considered the following to 
be our chief points of weakness: 

Materialistic tendencies. 

Striving for effect at the expense of any or all ideals. 



3o8 American Ideals 

Lack of simplicity. 

Lack of serious application to present or future 
problems. 

Loss of early ideals through the breaking up of 
what formerly constituted "Home Life.'* 

Lack of interest in religious thought. 

A prominent member of an American Peace 
Society said: 

The tolerance of liquor as a factor in society. 

The failure to know and to understand other na- 
tions. 

The heedless waste of national resources. 

The dominance of money and the neglect to guard 
the interest of the people from it. 

The belief that the state should help people in 
doing what they ought to do for themselves. 

The belief that the state should go beyond its 
cardinal duties of justice, sanitation, education, and 
peace. 

In all these regards I believe that America has a 
better record than any other large nation. 

A popular author said that American's weak- 
nesses consist of 

Inability to properly use their leisure hours, due 
to lack of education in the refined pleasures of life — 
music, literature, painting, etc. 

Lack of free outdoor activity; failure to develop 
basal fundamental muscles, and the growing tend- 



An American Symposium 309 

ency to participate passively rather than actively in 
manual sports (they prefer to "see" athletics rather 
than to participate in athletics. Consequently the 
danger of muscular degeneration and over-stimulus 
of the brain). 

Disregard of laws of personal hygiene and matters 
of sanitation. Intemperance in the matter of over- 
eating, undersleeping, and "bibbing" alcoholic bever-r 
ages. 

Perhaps a lack of independence in thought and 
feeling; undue desire to do as the others of their 
group do; the "keeping up with Lizzie" sort of living 
and consequent luxuries and their improper valua- 
tion. 

A shoe manufacturer in Massachusetts con- 
sidered the shadows of our ideals to be the fol- 
lowing: 

Unemployment. It is not creditable to our civil- 
ization that better arrangements have not been made 
for the systematic utilization of the brain — ^and 
muscle — labor of the race. 

"The earth brings forth abundantly," in accordance 
with God's primeval ordinance, but human methods 
of developing and distributing that product are 
haphazard, and a part of the population get too 
much, and a part none at all. 

A tendency to waste and extravagance both in 
private life and in the government of the city, the 
state, and the nation. This involves carelessness 



3IO American Ideals 

about the future and probable eventual embarrass- 
ment, and it breeds radicalism in private and public 
policy. If we are thoughtless about the day after 
to-morrow and come to grief, while our neighbor is 
forethoughtful and prosperous, we are inclined to 
resent his advantage and to seek in some way to 
penalize him. Note certain phases of the otherwise 
laudable labor movement, and also the demoralizing 
tendency toward class legislation. 

A professor and editor writes: 

It seems to me that the greatest defect of the body 
politic in our land is too little devotion to civic duties 
combined with the tendency to adhere too closely to 
party lines or to yield too readily to the claim of party 
allegiance. As I compare our own civic, state, and 
national politics and that of — say — England, I 
find a great gap. The government of Birmingham 
or Manchester is a century in advance of that of 
New York or Philadelphia so far as an intelligent 
comprehension of the needs of a great population 
is concerned, or so far as wise measures go to meet 
these needs. Were our own citizens fired with the 
will to do their parts in understanding the funda- 
mental requirements of poUtical administration, to 
exercise soberly the duty and right of choosing those 
administrators, and then of following them up to see 
that they "administered" properly, our politics would 
be cleaner and more eflFective. I would like to see 
our leisure class, the so-called **idle rich," engaged 
more earnestly in the study and pursuit of economics 



An American Symposium 311 

and the higher politics. Whatever may be said of 
the EngUsh aristocracy, it has furnished a line of ably 
equipped men to work in state offices, on the bench, 
in diplomacy, and elsewhere. 

A radical change is coming over the ideas of the 
distribution of wealth. We shall surely learn, are 
indeed in some small degree already putting it into 
practice, to distribute wealth more equably. Capital 
must have its due return, so must labor. Profit- 
sharing has come to stay. It must grow in extent 
of application. On the other hand, the levelling of 
the incompetent and the competent laborers as im- 
plied by some past labor movements has not and 
cannot justify itself. "A fair day's labor for a fair 
day's wage" is as imperative in requirement as is 
*'A fair wage for a fair day's labor." The maxim of 
the old Chinese sage must govern in the industrial 
world. He used the single word, "reciprocity." 
That must be fired with the Christ spirit, realization 
of a universal brotherhood, a brotherhood that is not 
enfeebled by its universality, but rather enriched by 
its expansiveness; this seems to me to be the key to the 
world's betterment. 

A clergyman in St. Louis: 

The chief points of weakness in our contemporary 
American life are (a) in social life, shallowness, the 
building of social relations upon artificial things such 
as ancestry, money, etc. (b) Intellectually, the lack 
of thoroughness. People do not think. They trust 
newspapers, often clothing them with infallibility. 



312^ American Ideals 

In religion the same is true. There is a woful lack 
of intelligence on religious matters, not only outside of 
religious circles, but among members of churches. 
This downright ignorance is responsible for the 
growth of all sorts of fads in religion, (c) Lack of 
ethical enthusiasm. This is seen in industrial rela- 
tions, business transactions, social ideals, religious 
life, and everywhere else. 

I do not think that the United States is any worse 
off than any other country. Indeed, I believe the 
contrary. 

From a college president in Ohio: 

1. Lack of forethought. 

2. Too great fondness for physical comfort and 
physical splendor. 

3. Indisposition to think hard and to read good 
books. 

4. Lack of individuahty or the presence of the 
desire to follow the fashion. 

5. Too great fondness for the picturesque. 

6. A newspaper press without proper sense of 
responsibility. 

7. Disregard of properly constituted authority. 

The secretary of a national missionary society 
of one of the larger denominations has this to 
say: 

Failure to read strong, vigorous, wholesome books, 
especially the Bible. 



An American Symposium 313 

Tendency to look upon the college course more as 
a pleasure than as a source of intellectual profit. 

Living beyond one's means and trying to keep up 
two or more establishments when one is sufficient. 

Tendency to untruthfulness and to lower grad- 
ually the standards of daily conduct. 

A pride in past achievements, and mistaking move- 
ment for progress, while gradually the whole life is 
running on the down grade. 

A teacher in the University of Michigan: 

To me, as a foreigner, the weakness (no less than 
the strength) of contemporary American life asserts 
Itself very distinctly, the more that the process is 
unconscious. Folk live far too much in the moment: 
they stop to reflect too seldom. Above all, they 
tend to postpone the really serious things of life 
under the supposition that, till a certain material or 
economic plane has been reached, this postponement 
is safe. I take it that this is due in a large measure 
to the one main characteristic in which the residents 
of the United States agree — a political outlook. 

This makes for compromise; but it hides the fact 
that compromise, even if thoroughly viable, leaves the 
fundamental questions of principle untouched. And 
principle cannot be determined except by close 
attention to thinking, and by serious study of the 
permanent things. The result is that, as concerns 
these most serious affairs, we rush blindly at a con- 
clusion when stress arises, and pay ourselves with 
makeshifts. 



314 American Ideals 

A secretary of the Young Men's Christian 
Association in the West: 

To be more afraid of being caught than we are 
afraid of wrongdoing. 

To mistake an outward veneer of pretence for a 
deep-rooted inner Hfe. 

Too much time is given to the hurry and bustle 
of Hfe and not enough to its best values. 

The home and home life as such receives too little 
attention for our own best good. 

Mistaking acquaintances for friends — underesti- 
mating the value of true friendship. 

Depending too much upon outside entertainment 
rather than trying to develop such a life as will 
make one's self good company for others as well as for 
one's self. 

A university president in California states his 
opinion: 

Our chief national failing is made up of a union of 
fussiness, nervousness, hurry; **keeping up with the 
times"; reading the latest novel; seeing a little of 
everything, just enough to talk about it; general thin- 
ness due to admiration of versatility; "government" 
by bluff, a natural result of shallow equipment. 

A multimillionaire mine owner thinks that 
our weaknesses consist of 

Extravagance and inefficiency. The Americans of 
formergenerations have been the most efficient people 



An American Symposium 315 

in the world and in many respects they are so yet, 
but I think there has been a great decrease in this 
respect in the American people during the past two 
generations. This is probably mainly due to educa- 
tion and association with other inefficient people. 

Aside from our technological and so-called voca- 
tional educational institutions, the education fur- 
nished seems to be much like giving a young man or a 
young woman a box of tools, and without instruc- 
tions how to use them, expect them to build wagons, 
furniture, houses, etc. I think there has been some 
change for the better in this respect during recent 
years, but the ordinary education seems to be con- 
fined to furnishing the tools and allowing the student 
to find out how to use them as he may. 

In former generations so much was done at home 
that young people growing up unconsciously became 
thoroughly acquainted with all practical matters 
relating to life and the human effort required in 
carrying on the affairs of life; but during the past 
two generations the factory system has developed so 
rapidly that now nearly everything is made in fac- 
tories, and young people get little or no practical in- 
struction at home. 

I have had many college men apply to me for posi- 
tions who did not know how to get in and out of the 
office decently, and who did not know how to do a 
single thing that was of any practical benefit to any 
one. Such education as they had received seemed to 
be actually a detriment, and I am glad to see a tend- 
ency toward a more practical effort in this direction. 



3i6 American Ideals 

A clergyman in a large Eastern city, believes 
that: 

The chief points of weakness in our contemporary 
life are: 

First, shallow spiritual experience without ideas 
and with poverty-stricken ideals. 

Second, a gregariousness which seems to render the 
individual incapable of thinking, doing, or being for 
himself as an individual. 

Third, an absurd reverence for external signs of 
prosperity. 

Fourth, the absence of a sense of moral obligation 
in relation to the ordinary affairs of everyday people. 

Fifth, a growing attempt to make social and exter- 
nal conditions a substitute for internal Christianity. 

Sixth, a pernicious activity which has made repose, 
serenity, inwardness of life, practically impossible. 

Seventh, a puerile lowering of the standards of 
virility to the level of little children. 

The editor of one of the most widely circu- 
lated American weeklies considers our chief 
points of failure: 

The supreme worship of wealth and the struggle 
to attain it, the principal flaw in our character as a 
people. In this struggle there is almost always too 
great a sacrifice. Were wealth sought in reasonable 
measure, it would bring comfort and enjoyment; but 
the common tendency is to seek it, not for rational 



An American Symposium 317 

uses, but as a means for acquiring still more. There 
is no country in the world where we find so many men 
of middle age still engrossed in making money. 
Other lands have their leisure class, who have with- 
drawn, to some extent at least, from the active 
struggle in order that they may study those graces 
that give refinement and nobility to age, and which 
furnish opportunities for helping those who are be- 
ginning the battle in stress and difficulties. Wealth, 
rightly considered, is a stewardship which should 
carry with it a wide recognition of our responsibility. 
Fortunately, this recognition is steadily growing. 
I think Andrew Carnegie was right when he said 
that the time was coming when it would be considered 
a disgrace for an American to die rich. The really 
wise and good man should be his own executor. 

Another outstanding element of weakness in our 
social and business life is the widely prevalent lack of 
appreciation of the Golden Rule. Selfishness and 
indifference lead to many hard and cruel situations. 
If the Christ spirit were within us, even in small 
measure, we would give greater attention to our busi- 
ness methods. There would be less misrepresenta- 
tion, less driving of close bargains, less exploiting of 
employees, less of the evils of drudgery and child 
labor — in a word, less selfishness. The application of 
the simple rule of Christ's teaching would help us to 
think more of our neighbor than we do, and to give 
more consideration to the rights of others. We are 
intent in everything we undertake, so full of the sheer 
love of the battle that we show little or no mercy. 



3i8 American Ideals 

The president of the graduating (1915) class 
at the University of Wisconsin writes: 

The chief weakness in our public life at present, as 
it appears to me, is the feeling that if I don't do a 
thing some one else will. Few men in public life 
are taking a share in doing a thing for which they 
are not directly responsible, and too many are not 
doing the things for which they are directly respon- 
sible. The unpleasant thing about our private life 
in America is that it is difficult to have a private life 
under present conditions. The citizen as a private 
individual is a slave to public opinion, and conse- 
quently does not dare to do what he thinks best or 
wisest if that thing excites comment. 

A New York banker: 

I feel that present political consideration makes it 
difficult for individuals confidently to go into new 
ventures or to look forward to future prosperity, and 
that this unrest and tendency toward socialism is at 
the bottom of the present depression and lack of 
employment. 

A Boston banker: 

The passion for "getting on," with accompanying 
failure to see what one is getting on toward. 

Pride in power and in the ownership of things. 
Too great reliance on the finality of material. 

The lust for spending and having others know that 
one spends. 



An American Symposium 319 

Too much confidence in the necessary and fore- 
ordained greatness of the United States. 

Failure to relate ideals to practical conduct, to 
realize the one and to transfigure the other. 

A congressman: 

Extravagance in living. Most Americans prefer 
to spend money rather than not to spend it, and 
therefore very many spend money foolishly, and 
upon things which were better not purchased. 

The feeling that what we do ought to meet the 
approval of other nations, for example, rather than 
our own approval. This is because as a nation and 
as individuals we are still rather more vain than proud. 

Editor of an educational magazine: 

From the standpoint of the best interests of the 
country I regard the greatest weakness and the 
greatest source of danger to be the tendency to main- 
tain "solidarity" among various classes. "The 
solidarity of women'* — "the solidarity of Roman 
Catholics" — "the solidarity of the German — Irish — 
Italian vote." The future of the Democracy de- 
mands that we shall work together and not stand 
apart, preserving and abetting social, racial, religious 
antagonisms. 

Another weakness is a tendency on the part of a 
large number of Americans to leave important re- 
sponsibilities to the few. Too little understanding 
of public questions and the workings of practical 



320 American Ideals 

politics. Too little real interest in the public school. 
Too little comprehension of the causes of social un- 
rest. 

While things go well with us we are not inclined to 
concern ourselves with the real problems of the day. 

Headmaster of a boys' academy in Penn- 
sylvania: 

If the spirit of high honor prevailed throughout the 
nation, even in th^ far corners of the same, as it 
prevails in the lives of many of the best men I know, 
our nation would be the most nearly ideal nation on 
the face of the earth. 

A well-known New Jersey city official states 
that our weaknesses are 

Selfishness — insincerity — ^jealousy. 

Tendency to destroy rather than to construct. 

Too little attention given individually to the seri- 
ous side of life. 

Ignorance concerning our public life and officials 
outside of knowledge gathered from the newspapers. 

Too busy to live up to what we know is right. 

Entertainment receives more consideration than 
education. 

A high-school principal: 

One of the chief weaknesses is an absence of 
tenacity and a dearth of purpose. 



An American Symposium 321 

There is also too little of abstract philosophical 
thinking on any subject. 

A religious director of six thousand university 
students: 

One weakness is that of indulgence. Our life is 
crammed these days with opportunities for relaxing; 
the picture show, the ball game, the theatre, the 
novel, and the canoe grip the lives of a great many 
and absorb their best energies. 

* * * * 

I firmly believe that there are more men of exalted 
religious type in our colleges and universities than 
anywhere else in the world. 

A public official in Cleveland, Ohio: 

A belief in our national good luck which makes 
us assume rather light-heartedly that America can- 
not help turning out well, and, therefore, indisposes 
us to the labor of making it turn out well. 

Our tolerance of such evils as sensational newspa- 
pers, debasing dramatic exhibitions, and overemo- 
tional motion picture shows. These are probably due 
to our not having yet solved the problem of leisure. 

The head of a New York publishing house 
says that our weaknesses are 

A tendency to subordinate everything to making 
money and dancing, and to getting up societies for the 
reformation of everything. 



322 American Ideals 

An author of wide repute finds three failures 
in our ideals: 

Excessive popular influence in politics. 
Lack of information about European affairs. 
Too much self-confidence and complaisance. 

A leading sociologist writes: 

The chief point of weakness is the identifying of 
success in life with money-making or ordinary com- 
mercial success. This comes from the past ascend- 
ancy of business men in shaping the ideals of 
Americans. Although within the last ten years the 
revelations of business morals have weakened some- 
what this ascendancy, nevertheless, even to-day, the 
pubHc gives too much heed to the business class and 
too little to such champions of permanent value, as 
poets, artists, thinkers, educators, social workers, 
physicians, eugenists, economists, and geologists. 

A second point of weakness is the excessive rever- 
ence on the part of the Courts for the rights of prop- 
erty in cases in which the management of property 
comes into conflict with the life, wealth, or happiness 
of human beings, with the interest of society, or with 
the vitality of the race. 

A professor in Baylor University, Texas, con- 
sidersourneed of improvement to lie in relation to 

The disintegrating factors of selfishness and com- 
petition over against the necessity of the community 



An American Symposium 323 

spirit, the brotherly Hfe, and the outward expression 
of it in organized cooperation. 

The secretary of a large foundation fund con- 
siders that our failures consist in 

Personal preferment and pleasures at any cost. 

The refusal of so many to think, to face the facts, 
and to come to a wise attitude toward life and to a 
determination of well-thought-out ideals. 

The president of the Board of Education in 
an Eastern city: 

I believe that we are too greatly disposed to depend 
on an optimistic belief in our ability to handle almost 
any question, no matter how limited our knowledge 
or experience may be. The thorough and painstak- 
ing effort and speciahzed knowledge of which we have 
seen recent examples in other nations, are not, in my 
opinion, sufficiently valued by our people. 

The head of a large military academy in the 
Middle West reports our failures in the follow- 
ing directions: 

Rural depopulation and urban congestion. 

Race suicide of the fittest and overbreeding by the 
unfit. 

Mental superficiality as manifested by a lack of 
thoroughness in almost every line of work, by the 
patronage of cheap literature, cheap music, degrading 



324 American Ideals 

plays, and the almost total eclipse of the inner 
man. 

As a result of this mental superficiality the preva- 
lence of half-baked and prejudiced opinions on mat- 
ters of local or national importance and almost total 
ignorance of the great thoughts of the past. 

An analysis of the answers of one hundred 
men as to the chief points of weakness in our 
contemporary American life, from which the 
preceding quotations have been taken, reveals 
the following facts : 

(The table below gives the number of times the 
designated weaknesses were mentioned.) 

No. times 
mentioned 

Materialism, dominance of money, worship of 

bigness, deference to material success ... 27 

Want of thoroughness, superficiality . ... 20 

Extravagance and wastefulness 16 

Self-indulgence and complacency . . . . 15 
Lack of perspective and ignorance of foreign 

nations 14 

Lack of public responsibiHty generally ... 13 
Breaking up of home life and lack of home train- 
ing for children 9 

Shallowness in religion 8 

Evasion of law when possible without being 

caught 8 

Lack of respect for intellect ...... 6 



An American Symposium 325 

No. times 
mentioned 

Class legislation and class solidarity ... 5 

Imitativeness, lack of independence ... 4 
Exaggerated opinion of the greatness of the 

United States 4 

Intemperance in Hquor, eating, etc 3 

Love of display 3 

Lack of education for liberal leisure .... 2 

Irresponsible journaHsm . 2 

Unemployment 2 

*' Organizations" for everything 2 

Unequal distribution of wealth I 

Danger of our mixed population I 

The conclusion forced upon us by these testi- 
monies is that v^hile v^e have not yet attained 
our ideals as a people, we have become increas- 
ingly conscious of them. Our civilization has 
not reached the highest greatness, but it con- 
tains the elements of that greatness. Our men 
and women are not as yet full statured, but they 
are growing. 

These trenchant words of some of our best 
types of Americans remind us that democracy 
is still an earth spirit struggling often with 
indifferent success to lift itself above the petty 
intrigues of politicians, and rising only occasion- 
ally to the "vision splendid" of fraternal equality 
and sure justice. We are still the worshippers 



326 American Ideals 

of physical force and material rewards. Our 
idols have feet of clay. Our courts still mete 
out limping justice. Our education drives itself 
into the grooves of money and the making of a 
living rather than the building of strong man- 
hood and womanhood. We still fill the air of 
our modern Babylons with the strident cries 
of sensual satisfactions, and we barter our birth- 
right for a mess of pottage that only adds to our 
fleshly hunger and fails to feed our famishing 
souls. Our much vaunted civilization proves 
to be all too frequently in hours of crisis an un- 
substantial dream, and like our religion it is 
too often but a thin cloak to cover the naked- 
ness and selfish sordidness of perverse and pride- 
filled hearts. 

No thoughtful student of our times is blind 
enough to delude himself into sublime ease of 
mind and spirit, even while beholding our 
philanthropies, our pensions, and our peace 
policies that bedeck the outward surface of our 
modernity. No one who hears the confused 
wrangling of labor at Bayonne and in many a 
mining and industrial camp will wrap the man- 
tle of self-sufficiency about him and cry, "We 
are the People! Wisdom and virtue will die 
with us!*' Our finest progress toward the sense 



An American Symposium 327 

of Beauty and inward Power is but, in the words 
of Tennyson, 

The earHest pipe of half-awakened birds. 

Our ideals are too far from realization to per- 
mit of boasting; they are not as yet fixed guiding 
stars. 

Yet I venture to say that no one can read 
these frank and earnest answers of contempo- 
rary Americans, residing in widely separated 
areas and employed in diverse callings, without 
feeling that underneath even the most pessi- 
mistic of them there runs a sense, not of faihng, 
but of succeeding, even if slowly, in the perfect- 
ing of our hfe of business and public and private 
institutions. The private letters that accom- 
panied these witnesses abound in faith and hope. 

The very consciousness of the unattained 
ideals that our weaknesses exemplify are the 
surest signs of encouragement. The ideals of a 
people are always the forerunners of their 
practice, and when a higher ideal is sighted or 
taken in place of a lower one, the change in 
practice is sure to follow. 

Modern Christians do not always (as ancient 
pagans did not) exhibit the graces of mercy and 



328 American Ideals 

brotherly love; but the members of the present- 
day Christian civilization in America feel what 
men in the old Roman age did not feel — that in 
the failure to rise to the loftiest height of social 
cooperation with their fellows they are dropping 
below the standards of true men. The ideal of 
"service" easily leads all others in the above 
answers. The danger of the old pagan civiliza- 
tion, which placed brute force and violence, 
above brotherhood and the constructive arts of 
peace, lay not merely in its deeds of violence 
but in its admiration and worship of such exter- 
nal agencies as the true ideals of greatness. 
Spiritual ideals did not have a chance even in the 
mind. 

It is here that America is learning the first 
great lesson in national and individual idealism 
— the grasping of the truth that physical domi- 
nance and the vulgar, selfish pursuit of money 
as an end in itself are not the highest manifesta- 
tions of power. The man who delves into the 
American motives will find this in general to be 
true. This is a long step in idealism. To be 
sure many of the brutish and sordid relics of 
paganism and barbarism are yet evident among 
us and seem quite deeply rooted in human na- 
ture; but these do not survive in our admiration 



An American Symposium 329 

or approval, and I believe that they are gradually 
losing their influence over our thought — the 
centre from which all action springs. This is 
the triumph of American idealism. 

Even the man who has not attained to his 
ideals finds them ever present in the anticipation 
of his heart. He sees them realized in others 
and admires them from afar: and here in 
America we have a remarkable tendency to be- 
come what we admire. We are, as a nation, 
great enough to admire the character of Lincoln 
and to revere his name more and more as the 
days of our years go by. We are increasingly 
conscious of that high-mindedness and states- 
manlike bearing exhibited by the almost ideal 
Secretary of State, John Hay; and more than one 
of late has remarked with peculiar pride these 
qualities of devotion to humanity's cause 
shining so transparently in the hfe of Lincoln, 
and the choice, thoughtful culture of Mr. Hay, 
appearing together in the acts and habits of our 
President, Woodrow Wilson. 

The final aim of all great ideals is to make 
great men. That cause is strong, as Lowell has 
said, which has not a multitude but one strong 
man behind it. It should be the high aim of our 
American idealism to lift the nation above its 



330 American Ideals 

weakness and frailty by the production of men 
of quality, men of larger mental mould, men of 
firmer moral fibre, men who, whether storms or 
sunshine come, can be depended upon to say as 
did Seneca^s pilot: 

"O Neptune: you may save me if you will; 
you may sink me if you will; but whatever 
happens, I shall keep my rudder true." 



CHAPTER XI 
AMERICA COMING OF AGE 

Forever alive, forever forward, 

Stately, solemn, sad, withdrawn, baffled, mad, tur- 
bulent, feeble, dissatisfied, 

Desperate, proud, fond, sick, accepted by men, re- 
jected by men, 

They go! They go! I know that they go, but I 
know not where they go. 

But I know that they go toward the best — toward 
something great. 

Walt Whitman. 

The United States will never see fifty again; nor a 
hundred. We are full grown. 

Owen Wister. 



CHAPTER XI 
AMERICA COMING OF AGE 
George Wade, the sculptor, once said: 

I could tell an American immediately, not by 
manner, walk, or clothes, or anything external, but 
by the peculiar expression of his eye. It is an ex- 
pression I find hard to analyze. It is a look which 
seems to embrace the future rather than the present 
or the past. The American has the open-eyed look of 
confident anticipation. 

Emerson was not the only one who has called 
America another term for opportunity. Many a 
prophet has seen envisaged on this Western con- 
tinent an all-encompassing future civilization, 
a land of promise without parallel, the country 
of the new hope. 

** Borne over the Atlantic,'* cried the prophetic 
Carlyle in his warning to Europe, **to the closing 
ear of Louis, king by the grace of God, what 
sounds are these — muffled, ominous, new in our 
centuries? Boston Harbor is black with un- 

333 



334 American Ideals 

expected tea; behold a Pennsylvania congress 
gather; and ere long, on Bunker Hill, Democ- 
racy announcing, in rifle volleys death-winged, 
under her star banner, to the tune of Yankee- 
doodle-do, that she is born, and, whirlwind-like, 
will envelop the whole world!*' 

Prophecy has been made history and America 
has become of age. Her Alps are passed; her 
Italy lies before her. With face still shining 
in youthful hope and unquenched optimism, 
America yet belongs to the Party of the Present, 
but she is becoming interested in the Party of 
the Future. 

America has been called a Providential re- 
public. By the nature of an unseen and often 
unappreciated cosmic force she has been in- 
evitably urged far ahead of the dreams of her 
founders. The processes of the years have 
gradually widened her boundaries. To the south 
came Texas and New Mexico and the French 
lands where Napoleon had dreamed of making 
a new empire in the West for France. Later in 
a hundred days of war, which we at the time 
could scarcely understand, the West Indies 
became America's southern boundaries. It 
was as if propelled by this irresistible force of 
destiny that Lewis and Clarke forged their way 



America Coming of Age 335 

through the western wilderness and *' planted 
our banners by the shores of the Peaceful Sea." 
Then the nation that never dreamed of conquest 
found Alaska as her child in the frozen North, 
and her star of empire was to lead her yet 
farther, even toward the Eastern sunrise, until 
her West became East, and the eagle in her 
flight found her stepping-stones upon the isles 
of the Pacific and in distant Southern Seas. 
It was not by chance that the hand of Jefferson 
wrote with intuitive fingers an instrument of 
"delegated powers" that has served as chart 
and compass over these new and untried waters. 
A Greater Hand moved the pen whose writing 
has served so well to guide a new race of men in 
their purposed destiny. Theodore Roosevelt, 
in a memorable address with which he dedicated 
the St. Louis Exposition, said, "As is so often 
the case in nature, the law of development of a 
living organism showed itself in its actual 
workings to be wiser than the wisdom of the 
wisest." 

This new republic, carved out of the unknown, 
the unexpected, is no longer an experiment. It 
has been tried by war and by peace, by adversity 
and by prosperity. American idealsare facts 
for which men have dared to die. 



336 American Ideals 

Here she has shown her capacity, not only to 
tame a wilderness and to irrigate deserts, but 
also to govern successfully 100,000,000 of the 
most diverse populations known on the face of 
the earth. Here she has settled once for all 
time her union of states in a dolorous but de- 
livering civil war. She has gone out to the 
uttermost parts of the earth with her commerce 
and her colonists. By adhering through many 
a conflict to sound economics, she has estab- 
lished her financial credit on a basis as firm and 
trustworthy as that of any nation beneath the 
sun. Her home industries are attended by a 
prosperity at once both the envy and the emula- 
tion of her national neighbors. She has built 
through the Isthmus of Panama a waterway as 
unprecedented in its conception and construction 
as it is, in its equal access to all the world, sig- 
nificant of human serviceableness. Scarcely 
an achievement known to modern science is a 
novelty in America. Already the United States 
has revealed herself as her own most sedulous 
policeman, and her reforms of herself have been 
as startling as the perils they foreshadowed 
have been ominous. She has raised up great 
men, great political parties, great schools, and 
great colleges. She has become the fostering 



America Coming of Age 337 

mother of some of the finest charities, the great- 
est railroads, and the most prodigious manu- 
facturing and business corporations extant. In 
this vast world drama of modernity enacted 
before the eyes of men there pass indescribable 
scenes filled with laborers, technicians, capital- 
ists, builders of cities and tunnels, makers of lit- 
erature and laws, seers and saints of a new 
world of imagination and religion, and a pro- 
cession well-nigh endless of strong, intrepid 
youth. 

It is a story of enchantment, this shining 
record of progress and freedom of America com- 
ing of age. These things of the hand and the 
mind and spirit she has accomplished "without 
an ally and without an enemy" among the 
nations. She stands to-day upon the hilltop, 
and they that look upon her achievements are 
Uke them that dream. 

With such unexampled growth, with a face 
still radiant with the light of her morning, 
America is to-day entering upon a new period — 
the period of maturity. Livingstone, at the end 
of his daring and successful discoveries in the 
heart of the Dark Continent, said: "The end of 
the exploration is the beginning of the enter- 



33^ American Ideals 

prise." It is with some such feeling that the 
American, rich in his unexpressed idealism, cap- 
able in the realm of his spirit and imagination 
as in the sphere of his material world, faces the 
light of a new era. 

There is a sense in which every hour in a 
nation's progress is a critical hour, a sense in 
which every day is doomsday. In a philosophical 
mind every hour marks the end of an era, and 
every year sets its sign on a new order of ages. 
In a certain sense a country is always passing 
through a transition period, and the rapidity 
with which the Hfe of yesterday coalesces with 
the Hfe of to-day in this strangely progressive 
land has often puzzled and baffled the contem- 
porary prophet and historian who has endeavored 
to restrict America within distinctive epochs. 
But there come times in the career of nations as 
of individuals, so plain that he who runs may 
read, when there is a necessary cleavage between 
the past and the future, and when a people, 
especially, are pressed forward as by a dynamic 
force into a new and inevitable destiny. 

One of these moments was recorded when 
these United States swept forward alone into a 
strange world of political responsibility — that 
memorable hour of transfer of national leader- 



America Coming of Age 339 

ship from British to American hands. Another 
fixed and unforgettable point of duration marked 
the day when over the martyred form of Lincoln 
the North and the South clasped hands of un- 
divided citizenship. And when the Book of 
History is fully written there will be at least 
one other turning of the tide in America there 
portrayed. It will be the painting of the days 
our eyes are now beholding, when the thunder 
of cannon and the hiss of torpedoes are rever- 
berating in the ears of a war-maddened world* 
and America almost alone stands apart, the 
fateful spectator and arbiter of this "Iliad of 
woes." In these days of changing and tangled 
destiny in the life of European nations, when 
the United States is called upon to bear back 
to Europe some light from the torch which was 
kindled there and which has brightened into a 
steady flame in America's hand, in these hours 
when the country's ideals and institutions and 
men are put to the test as perhaps never before, 
we must perforce choose our path with a fresh 
directive eye; we must stamp our present period 
with a new reappraisement. 

What ideals now emerging must emerge, 
if we are true to ourselves, to awaken our present 
energies, to give tonic and timbre to our future 



340 American Ideals 

hopes? What sleeping, inarticulate dreams are 
being rudely disturbed and dragged forcibly out 
into the light of common day by this doomful 
cataclysm of war? 

If we mistake not, they are the ideals and the 
dreams that prefigure America's coming of age. 
They are the ideas and the convictions which will 
foreshadow the new creative idealism of the 
inner spirit of America, rising out and above the 
foundations of her vast material conquests and 
growing life. Mr. A. E. Zimmern, the don of 
Oxford, in his essay entitled *' Seven Months in 
America," calls America ** a state of mind." It 
is in a change of this American "state of mind," 
or perhaps in an opening of an untried or unoccu- 
pied portion of it, the part that lies in the realm 
of the spirit and the resources of the higher 
understanding, that she is to see herself in these 
new days of her richer maturity. America is 
facing a mighty test of her ideals. The spirit 
of Democracy, which at the centre is brother- 
hood, or meant to be, is on trial. The informing 
and vital breath of the country's religion will be 
fanned into new flame or will be withered by 
these days. The voice of the nation's con- 
science, which is the voice of God, will be heard 
afresh, and there will be a new soul's awakening. 



America Coming of Age 341 

Those in America who have been turning their 
new and leisured thought to art, to literature, 
or to the putting of their moral and spiritual 
house in order, will find in the massive events of 
these heart-stirring hours meanings that are not 
found in pictures or books or written on our 
altar cloths. 

There are two great words frequently heard in 
the United States these days, standing for two of 
the inherent ideals of the nation: these words are 
Peace and Humanity. These words stand for 
aims deeply embedded in the original life of the 
nation; they belong to our first traditions; they 
breathe the atmosphere of the real and essential 
existence of America which is rooted in a spirit 
of equal justice and flowers in humanitarian 
sympathy on the high levels of man's brother- 
hood with man. It is for the revelation and the 
incarnate expression of these great ideals that 
all our previous history has prepared the way. 
It was to find an arena for this wider and larger 
sense of humanity that our early forefather 
pioneers in New England, in Virginia, and the 
South, "under such sullen and averted stars," 
laid the forests and built their homes and schools 
in this western hemisphere. It has been in 



342 American Ideals 

prelude to these ideals, these higher and far- 
sweeping dreams of the human spirit and 
imagination, that the later sons of the West have 
enlarged the borders of their agriculture, and 
have forged out their enormous scientific devel- 
opments in steam machinery, in electrical, 
economic, and political advance. It is for such 
ideals that the Republic finds its material civil- 
ization a meaningful ministrant and without 
which all its splendid wealth and earthly re- 
sources are as pointless as the tinkling of a tem- 
ple bell. Into this new idealism of a world made 
peaceful for the sake of its most precious prod- 
ucts — the members of the human race — our 
country has been slowly moving, and the wars 
of the nations have accelerated the wheels of its 
progress. 

Why is America at the daybreak of a new 
period of her constructive history predisposed 
and pledged to peace? Why is the ideal of be- 
ing the peacemaker among the nations attrac- 
tive in her eyes.^ It is because we came first 
to these western shores as searchers for this 
spiritual, peaceful inheritance; it is because deep 
in the inner consciousness of Americans there 
has always persisted the dim realization that 
if we lose this ideal, notwithstanding all the 



America Coming of Age 343 

opulence of our power and wealth, we shall be 
poor indeed. "Peace and Liberty" — these are 
America's sovereign words. They have been 
the watchwords of our greatest leaders. 

Washington said: **My first wish is to see this 
plague of mankind (war) banished from the 
earth. We have experienced enough of its evils 
in this country to know that it must not be wan- 
tonly or unnecessarily entered upon.*' 

Grant had reason to understand the full signif- 
icance of his words when, out of a heart weary 
with war, he cried: "Let us have peace!" The 
phrase of Sherman, "War is hell!" has become 
an epigram in the country, as trite as it is true, 
and stands in the common sentiment beside the 
prayer of the dying Lincoln that "this mighty 
scourge of war might speedily pass away." The 
name of one of America's most honored states- 
men, John Hay, is associated inextricably with 
the Golden Rule policy of peace and good will, 
both at home and abroad, the ideal of men of 
quaHty. In his address before the Press Parlia- 
ment of the World at the Louisiana Purchase 
Exposition at St. Louis in 1904, Mr. Hay uttered 
words pregnant with the national idealism and 
worthy to be framed above the desk of every 
newspaper editor in this and in every land: 



344 American Ideals 

''If the press of the world would adopt and per- 
sist in the high resolve that war should be no 
more, the clangor of arms would cease from the 
rising of the sun to its going down, and we could 
fancy that at last our ears, no longer stunned 
by the din of armies, might hear the morning 
stars singing together and all the sons of God 
shouting for joy." 

No nation has followed more devotedly in the 
wake of its statesmen's ideals in pioneering the 
causes of arbitration; no nation has poured out 
its money more lavishly in the interests of per- 
manent peace. Even when there is no peace 
in the sight of men, the American sees it afar 
off and seeks it sometimes almost blindly, be- 
cause his wish is the measure of his mind. In 
this regard a nation's ideal, lite that of a man, is 
estimated by what he wants quite as much as by 
what he gets. In the United States the sign of 
peace is a watermark of the racial consciousness. 
It belongs to us as truly as do our industries, it 
is the pledge and the prerequisite of our indus- 
tries — the eternal condition without which 
American freedom is not. 

It is with such heritage at home, and with 
strains of indebtedness to other nations we too 
seldom pause to consider, that we are bound and 



America Coming of Age 345 

indissolubly enmeshed in the peace and progress 
of mankind. It is sometimes overlooked both by 
our foreign neighbors and our own people that 
we did not begin in America. Many of our insti- 
tutions came as it were by enchantment, full 
statured in their transfer from the old to this 
new world. The "clouds of glory" of American 
spiritual life trail far back into distant Asia. 
Many of the roots of romance and insight, 
many a strain of thought and tradition, followed 
to its source would reach to France and Spain 
and England, whose children brought their 
visions and their culture Americaward. When 
the hard, steel-Kke face of the seemingly ma- 
teriahstic American lights up before the admi- 
ration of the beautiful, the chivalrous; when the 
warm tones of emotional feeling sweep the 
heartstrings of the practical business man, it 
is a strain of the Latin temperament that is 
speaking, it says to those who are most intent: 
"You must be a great and spiritual land, Amer- 
ica, for you are the offspring of all that is most 
excellent in this Old World from which you have 
drawn your life. You must be great for your 
own sake, and also for us who are to be more and 
more dependent upon you for that eternal 
spring of youth, and that priceless gift of peace 



346 American Ideals 

with liberty of which you are the embodiment 
among the nations." 

But it is not the full story of America's coming 
of age to repeat that she has been conceived and 
nourished and has grown to maturity in the 
atmosphere of peace. There is another and 
even a more fundamental ideal for which this 
land is renowned. A greater word than peace 
to the new western world is this word — Hu- 
manity. It is for humanity, not in the abstract, 
not merely in the masses, not in the form of 
nations entirely, but in the concrete human in- 
dividual that America is to be more and more a 
specialist. There is no peace of nations where 
there is no peace in the heart of the individuals 
who compose those nations. There is no unity 
worthy of the name in monarchy or democracy 
where there is no harmony and disciplined power 
in the units who unite. America can never 
be truly great and truly free, she can never 
expect peace to reign within her borders, nor 
can she dream of peacemaking around the world, 
until she awakens anew to the thought that the 
institution is but the elongated shadow of the 
man; that the body corporate can advance no 
farther than the body individual has advanced, 
and that the secret of any lasting renown among 



America Coming of Age 347 

the races of men resides in the degree in which 
great ideals and high convictions have caught 
fire in the souls of individual men — men one by 
one. This is the high business of democracy, 
this individuahsm of the private soul, this rivet- 
ing the strength of the nation to the disciplined 
wills and the enlarged hearts of persons, who 
are more potent than policies. This is building 
the national temple with the *' living stones" 
of human personalities who have been awakened 
to the superb consciousness and eternal dignity 
of themselves. That nation that strengthens 
its individuals strengthens itself, and in the 
surest manner possible. It is the most unfail- 
ing patriotism that anchors its hope not in 
chancelleries, nor in admiralties, but in the 
inflexible purposes of righteousness in the hearts 
and consciences of the great men and women 
whom individual patriotism has made. 

To draw an illustration from the pages of 
celestial wisdom, there was a time in the days of 
the King Josiah when the imperial splendor of 
Judah seemed about to take precedence over 
the private Hfe of the individual. The nation, 
the masses, the armies, the government, and the 
material power were more and more. The 
people, dazzled with the glory of might and 



348 American Ideals 

things, cried: "The days of our David have 
returned." Before the eyes of the Httle Jewish 
Kingdom there passed only visions splendid of 
promised lands and political power for the na- 
tion. The man was lost in the crowd. 

Suddenly there comes a crash. The king 
falls upon the bloody field of Megiddo, Judah 
as a nation goes to pieces, is carried captive to 
Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar. On the banks 
of the Chebar where the captive people were 
set to work, after the blast of imperialism and 
material worship had passed, we are shown that 
for the first time in their history the God of 
ancient Judaism began to speak to each in- 
dividual, to address not the nation but the 
person — man by man. Heretofore the Jew had 
said: "These messages are not for me, they are 
for the nation; our God is too political to be 
personal, too zealous for the mass to care for 
me.'* The very sense of loyalty to the nation, 
the working for the matchless splendor of 
Judah, had obscured the rights of the individual 
soul. In their exile, in their disassociation from 
corporate satisfactions, they found their souls. 

It is somewhat thus that one discovers, here 
and there atleast,inthe United States a tendency 
to pass out of the **age of arithmetic" into the 



America Coming of Age 549 

age of the adornment of the individual spirit. 
Even our sociaHzed service has been, Hke Judah's 
patriotism, an obstacle to the development of 
those individual ideals without which no na- 
tional ideal is meaningful. 

America has all the conditions of a great 
civiHzation, but it must be remembered that 
in the highest sense her civilization is not yet 
great, she has not achieved the full use of her 
wings. There is indication that the people who 
have seen with clear eyes during these days of 
world war, noting the fact that great materiali- 
ties or great aristocracies are not synonymous 
with great humanities, are perceiving that a 
high civilization can never be truly defined in 
terms of physical armament or by such words 
as bulk, and size, and far, and near. Great 
states, hke great individuals, belong to that 
"remote concentration" that believes and stakes 
all upon the sovereignty of great ideas, of larger 
education, of unbounded belief in individualism 
and peace among men. 

Upon her material and vast industrial bases 
America, grown to maturity, must now build 
carefully and faithfully her thought life, her 
life of the international and individual mind. 
To learn to think straightly and dispassion- 



350 American Ideals 

ately, to add knowledge to knowledge, and to 
supplement her resistless energy by disciplined 
restraint, is the new and peculiar opportunity of 
America coming of age. 

The United States in its youth has learned the 
lesson purchased by its own blood, that no 
people permanently will endure the subjugation 
of their rightful liberty — that freedom, real 
and not fanciful, old and also new, and always 
fresh and heaven-born, is the one and only 
force that will unite in undying cause the souls 
of men. She has yet to learn, at least in its 
larger and finer scope, that the only element 
in which freedom can freely live and move and 
have its being, is that of the larger universal 
mind to which the independence of the in- 
dividual minds have contributed each a share. 
Freedom is the ideal of America, and Wisdom 
must be Freedom's guiding spirit. 

America is coming of age in a period of un- 
exampled opportunity in world affairs. Her 
fancied isolation has been rudely shattered. 
The present world conflict, with its earth-shak- 
ing influences, already by its tremendous effect 
upon our economic, industrial, and emotional 
Hfe, has awakened the nation at a destined 



America Coming of Age 351 

moment to the fact that we can no longer exist 
on a continent apart, but that we have become 
by the arbitrament of time and tragedy of 
circumstance a part and parcel of world respon- 
sibility. In her young manhood America is 
summoned to cultivate an aptitude for altruism, 
and her future as a great or small civilization 
hangs upon her present choice. Henceforth, if 
we are to make the gift of our forefathers- -that 
sacred deposit of freedom — meaningful, we must 
be ready with foresight and wisdom heretofore 
unsummoned to take our burden of world 
obligation, as well as to prepare to care for the 
enlarging interests that are our own. The 
nation's calamity howlers and the sword rattlers 
who have been crying out during the past years 
for armament have doubtless caught transient 
gleams of this new order of America's respon- 
sibility, and even though their remedies have 
been so clumsily presented, they demand our 
consideration. Now, furthermore, these are 
joined by wiser and more numerous cooperators 
who are drawing a sword never before dreamed 
of in America, whose banner carries no spread- 
eagleism, no mere selfish slogan of ''America 
for Americans," save as such battle-cry may be 
needful against unprecedented attacks upon our 



352 American Ideals 

homes and firesides. These leaders of the new 
order are the apostles of a wider perspective. 
President Wilson has spoken the words of their 
Magna Charta in his already famous Philadel- 
phia address: 

It is sometimes possible to be so right as not to 
have to fight for our rights. 

It is thus that we match the patriotism of our 
youth with the wisdom of our manhood, and 
gain the seerlike capacity to see beyond the 
moment, beyond passion, beyond hurt feelings, 
beyond the domination of the temporal. This 
new America is not the cowardly America; it is 
the America sobering with her age, rising in her 
stirrups, so to speak, using the eyes of her mind 
as well as the vigor of her national spurs, look- 
ing across the hilltop — the nation refusing to be 
stampeded because she "sees things steadily 
and sees them whole.'' 

Our fathers brought to our shores from 
Europe in their frail sailing ships a precious 
endowment with which to inform and to actuate 
the young republic. They were the ideals of 
political and religious freedom. These ideals 



America Coming of Age 353 

have not yet been fully perfected in our hands, 
but they have been fostered and extended in a 
legion of ways among our own citizenship, 
as well as among those who have sought 
homes on our shores. These ideals have per- 
meated all our institutions. They have made 
an atmosphere for American hopes and Amer- 
ican enterprises. We of to-day may be 
called upon in the new morning of America's 
maturity, in the very dawn of her spiritual 
strength, as the unhostile representatives of her 
wealth and insight, to send back to Europe this 
priceless spirit of idealism, not in the terms of 
battleships, but in the language of brotherhood, 
not wearing the insignia of world power, but 
clothed in the shining garments of Peace. 



THE END 



INDEX 



INDEX 



Abbott, Dr. Lyman, regarding religion 



224 



Achievement, American desire for 58 

Activity, law of American being 45 

Agassiz, Professor, Ideas on Education .... 167 

Akron, Ohio, immigration classes 243 

Alden, Henry Mills 52, 60 

America 

Defined by Oxford don 340 

Growth of 334 

New period 337 

Opportunity and world affairs 350 

Wealth per inhabitant I7» 18 

Materialistic 30 

American 

Active temperament 5 

Adaptability 112 

Analyzed by Frenchman 3 

Anticipating 10 

Bigness attractive 13, 61, 64 

Business man 37 

Civilization 349 

Contrasted with Britisher, 8, 20, 81, loi, 104, 115, 118 
Contrasted with East Indian . . 58, 128, 134, 136 

Economics 336 

European rootage 345 

Expansive imagination 124 

357 



358 Index 

American — Continued pagb 

Geniality 60, 67 

Humor 14,60 

Humanitarian ideals 103,111 

Industry 15 

Latin temperament 345 

Love of difficulties 83 

Love of money 21,116 

Love of new things 112, 113, 118 

Maturity of 333 

Mysticism 153 

Poor Men 26 

Providential Republic 334 

Religious temperament 206 

Steam machinery 11 

Symposium 287 

Timesavers 12 

Traditions 342 

Annapolis, Naval Academy i8i 

Arbitration 266, 267 

Aristocracy, in England and United States . . 102 
Arnold, Matthew, criticisms of America and Eng- 
land 99, 220, 287 

Art, present day tendencies 341 

Asia, influence on Occident 130 

Austen, Jane 55 

Austro-Hungarian immigration 231 

B 

Bacon regarding wealth 251 

Banker of Boston regarding civilization . . . 298 

Banks as moulding forces 193 

Baroda, Gaekwar of 139 

Bayonne, labor troubles 326 



I 



Index 359 



PAGE 



Bedouin chief ii 

Bergson, philosophy of 43, 183 

Best sellers 54 

Bible study in colleges and schools .... 122, 184 

Bible versus Vedanta 137 

Billings, Josh * . . . . 262 

Birthrate 232 

Bismarck regarding German youth 182 

Books, circulation of in New York Public Library . 57 

Books on America by Englishmen 100 

Bowring, Doctor, quoted 5 

British commission on education 165 

British failure in Far East 114 

Broadway and the simple life 282 

Brotherhood, Cain and Abel example .... 92 

Bryce, James, on lax enforcement of laws . . . 257 

Bryan, W. J., pictured by cartoons 66 

Buddhism 136, 147 

Business 

Business men too influential, says sociologist . 322 

Better understanding needful 95 

Fear 94 

Troubles . . . . 280 

C 

California undergraduate writes 289 

Carlyle, quoted concerning literature, humor, and 

prophecy 9, 46, 62, 333 

Carnegie 23 

Catholic church 200 

Charities 337 

Chinese responsibility 262 

Chinese ancestor worship 75 



360 Index 



PAGE 



Chinese poet, quoted 156 

Citizenship and the colleges 179 

Christianity and war 217, 221 

Christianity for the individual . . . . 212, 220 

Church, contemporary opinion of ... . 193, 199 

Churchill, Winston 48 

City, church life 207 

Clemens, S 27, 62 

Clough, John E., autobiography .... 144, 145 

Clergyman on national tendencies 293 

Clement of Alexandria regarding riches .... 274 
Columbia University, teacher quoted .... 299 
Comenius, Bishop — ideal of education .... 167 

Columbus — sailed to find East 129 

Core of Christian religion 222 

Coit, Stanton 44 

Culture and agriculture 168 

Commons, Prof. John R 34 

Cornell, Ezra, foundation idea of university . . 169 

Constitution, American 72, 73, 198 

Constitution, British 80 

Cleveland Immigration League described . . . 240 

Country life, attraction of 281 

Culture defined by Frenchman 178 

D 

Dairy Department in university, research work . 170 

Daniels, Josephus 66 

Debts, disgrace of in country sections . . . .281 
Democracy 

Lincoln's idea 69 

Square deal 7l> 74 

Universal desire for 81 



Index 361 

Democracy — Continued page 

In Canada 82 

Gain in respect for law 85 

Dependent on sacrifice and brotherhood . 95, 340 

Utopian vagaries relative to 90 

Denominations, religious, number of 197 

Dharma, its place in India 139 

Dickens, receipt for happiness 280 

Discipline, lacking in public institutions . . . 259 

Drama 214 

Drink problem 78, 288 

Drummond, Henry 267 



E 

East India, heart of Asia 134 

Eaton, Walter Prichard 52 

Edison, Thomas A 12, 103 

Education 

An American passion 157 

Classical 166 

Coalescing with life 168 

Cost of 161 

Definition of 178 

Educational Alliance 238 

Growth of 160 

Industrial 86,315 

Intellectual independence 162 

Practical 165 

Spiritual culture 174 

Teachers 173 

Variety of 169 

Vocational 171 

Waywardness of 173 



362 Index 



PAGE 



Edwards, Jonathan 197 

Efficiency engineering 10 

Eliot, Charles W., concerning Mr. Roosevelt . . 45 

definition of educated man 159 

Emerson, quoted 25, 97, 147, 163 

Egyptian Government students 173 

Engineer tells of professional aims 293 

English versus American ideals .... 81, 108, 268 

Ellis Island immigrants 247 

Equality, educational, political, and social 74, 89, 91, 164 

Essay writers 56, 62, 63 

Ettrick Shepherd 21 

Extravagance 271, 272 

Spending for show 275 

Spending leading to inefficiency 279 

Testimony of Congressman 319 

Testimony of multimillionaire 314 

F 

Fair play ideal 73 

Family pride 65 

Farmer writes of his views 302 

Fear as a national menace to prosperity ... 93 

Fiction, present day 46 

Fielding 55 

Fifth Avenue 276 

Filipino politicians 81 

First National Congress 73 

Florentine goldsmith 246 

Ford, Henry 41 

Franklin, Benjamin, quoted il 

Freedom, the uniting force of 350 

Free schools 164 



I 



Index 363 



PAGE 



Frohman, Charles, honesty of 88 

Frost, Robert 52 

G 

Galsworthy, John 104 

Gary plan of education 170 

George, Lloyd, political speeches 107 

Germany 23 

Example of social religion 215 

Immigration from 231 

State church 199 

Uniformity of education 164 

Gilman, Daniel C, ideal of education 175 

Gladstone regarding original sin 219 

Goethe 35 

Goethals and Panama Canal 58 

Governor, State, regarding national tendencies . . 288 

Government compared with England .... 310 

popular influence 322 

Grant, U. S., ideas of peace 343 

Grecian women and racial traditions .... 74 

Greek thought contribution to America . . . . 131 

Gribble, Francis, concerning Jowett 107 

H 

Habits, definition of 180 

Haldane, Lord, on international understanding . . 99 

Harper, WiUiam R 7 

Harriman, E. H 27 

Hasting, H. L., lecturer 76 

Hay, John, quoted 69, 86, 344 

Headmaster points out change of ideals .... 296 

Henry, O 49 



364 Index 



PAGE 



Hindu versus American religion 136 

Hindu at Ganges 75 

Holmes, O. W 9 

Honor, spirit of, needed 320 

Humanity, ideals of 341, 346 

Humor, American type 60-67 

Huxley, Thomas, definition of education . . . 178 

I 

Ideals 

Accomplishment 30 

American versus Oriental 127 

Bigness 13 

Business 71 

Church, Christian 193, 224 

Democratic 78 

Display of wealth 282 

Economic 21 

Education 172, 174 

Existing in thought 329 

Importance of ix 

Individual regeneration 211 

Leisure 308 

Liberty 79 

Missionary 143 

Peace and humanity 341 

Public responsibihty 289 

Racial 74 

Religious .... - 193 

Seen by Americans 288 

Self-indulgence 307 

Service 212 

Social uplift 211 

Success 26 



Index 365 

Ideals — Continued page 

Summarized 304-305 

Timesaving 12 

Unfulfilled 84 

Weakness of 254 

Immigrant, attitude toward 229 

Agencies 234 

Hope of problem 235 

Number of 229-233 

Artistry among 246 

Ingersoll, Robert 76 

India 

Division of life 141 

Millet fields 12 

Mother of Idealism 134 

Ruled by 178 

Individualism 

Christian 220 

Decides equality 92 

Importance of 346 

Intemperance 309 

Interstate Commerce Commission 94 

J 

James, Professor, on effort and philosophy . .183, 186 

Japanese gardens 39 

Jefferson, writer of "delegated power" .... 335 

Jewish kingdom 347-348 

Jewish scientist on tendency of nation .... 301 

Jordan, David Starr, regarding progress of democracy 88 

Joubert, definition of religion 191 

K 

Karr, Alfonse 61 

Keate, Doctor, story of at Eton I77 



366 Index 

PAGE 

Kilmer, Joyce 51 

Kingsley, Charles, on "Peace of Mood" . . . . 152 
King George in India 275 



L 

Labor conditions 309 

Lamb, Charles, after-dinner speech 63 

Larned, Colonel, regarding West Point curriculum . 181 

Latin temperament 345 

Laws 

and religion 223 

Lack of respect for 254, 256, 306 

Taft on criminal law 256 

Lawyer in West gives result of investigation . . 303 

Lewis and Clarke 334-335 

Liberality of young clergyman 195 

Liberty, religious 302 

Librarian regarding "social standing" .... 294 
Life insurance president regarding business ideals . 302 
Lincoln, Abraham 

His heart quality 103 

Prayer regarding war 343 

Relative to books 47 

Lindsay, N. V 50 

Literature, contemporary 46, 299 

Realistic ideals of 56 

Livingstone, explorer, quoted 337 

Londoner's view of working classes .... 277-278 
Lowell, J. R., quoted relative to democracy and 

education 62, 77, 161 

Lynchings 256 



Index 367 

M 



PAGE 



McClure, S. S., devotion to business 6 

McCutcheon, George Barr, quoted 57 

Magazine editor regarding ideal 292 

Maine farmer, incident of 64 

Markham, Edwin 52 

Masters, E. L 51 

Material prosperity, display of 271, 307 

Mayflower company 171 

Milnes, Richard Monckton 31 

Milton quoted on peace and war 265 

Missionaries in India 44, 143 

a unique method 267 

Moody, D. L 62 

Morgan, J. P 42 

Muckraking SSj^is 

Muir, John 26 

Muhammad, religious laws 222 

Multimillionaire mine owner on national failures . 314 

Miiller, Max, quoted 125 

Municipal Immigration Bureau, Cleveland, Ohio . 241 
Murray, Prof. Gilbert, contrasting English and 

American students 123 

N 

Naidu, Sarojini 138 

Napoleon 

Attitude to obstacles 5 

Dreams of new France in the United States . 334 

In Egypt 129 

Napoleonic not Christian 218 

Nationality, difficult of translation 100 

Nationalization 28 



368 Index 



PAGE 



New Jersey official relative to our contemporary life . 320 
Newspapers 

As present forces 193 

Publicity agents 263 

John Hay's address to the Press 344 

Newton, Sir Isaac, quoted 152 

New York, immigration problem 239 

Nuremburg, old wood carver of 245 

O 

Okuma, Count, interview concerning needs of Japan 225 

Orange, William of 201 

Orient 

Becoming westernized 139 

Brahmin caste rigid 134 

Home of "things invisible" 129 

Interchange of ideas necessary 132 

Mysticism similar to that of Americans . . 154 

Sympathetic imagination needful .... 133 

Oriental versus American 127, 274 

Oriental 58,131 

Oxford repression 105 

Oxford Union debates 106 

P 

Palmer, Professor, quoted 95 

Panama-Pacific Exposition 15 

Isthmus of 336 

Canal Bill 87 

Parker, Theodore, definition of Democracy . . . 85 

Participation of people in making laws .... 80 

Past, necessary to regard 130 



Index 369 

PAGE 

Pastors relative to admission of church members . 200 
Peace 

Victories of 265 

Ideals of 34^ 

Unstained 270 

Peace-at-any-price, foe to democracy . . . 263, 269 

Peabody, Francis, quoted 186 

Pennsylvania State Bar Association 256 

Personality .... 188 

Perspective, need of 318 

Philanthropy 213 

Phillips, Wendell 63 

Physician's estimate of profession 294 

Pilgrim ancestry, educational influence .... 161 

Pinkertons 255 

Playwright quoted 290 

Poet, ideals of 3^7 

Poetry, contemporary 50-52 

Preparatory schools, character of boys . . . . 176 
Press ParHament, John Hay's address . . . -343 

Princeton 58 

Prohibition laws 258 

Public schools, English 120-121 

Public opinion 79 

Publicity as a means of saving the State . . . . 215 

Publisher regarding American aims 297 

Q 

Quietness— the gift of Asia 148 

R 

Railroad officials 219 

Real-estate man's ideals • • 292 



370 Index 

PAGE 

Reform movements and weakness of same . .213, 321 
Religion 

American versus Eastern 136 

College 196-208 

Discussion of 201, 206 

Defined 191 

Temperament of people 210 

Social betterment 211 

"Rights" 75, 108 

Riis, Jacob 26 

Rockefeller, J. D 23 

Roberts, Dr. Peter, on immigration 237 

Root, Elihu xi 

Roosevelt, Theodore 45>335 

Russia, vodka legislation 79 

S 

Sanyassis 141 

Scandinavian immigration 231 

Schauffler, R. H., poem quoted 248 

Schoolmaster, giving summary of ideals of France . 301 

School discipline 181 

Scott, W 55 

Self-made men 104 

Seneca*s pilot quoted 330 

Service, public 195, 213, 289 

Settlements, social 203 

Social betterment as an ideal 211 

Socialism as a religion and danger 210,318 

Socialist editor summarizes ideals 296 

Socrates 224 

Square deal sentiment in college and everyday 

affairs 71, 87, 88 



Index 371 



PAGE 



Stanford, Senator, founding university . . . . 163 

Stanley, Henry M i 

Stevenson, R. L., quoted regarding style, English, 

and money 54, 105, 287 

Sunday, attitude toward 2CX) 

Success, as an ideal 26, 253 

Symonds, J. A., regarding Whitman philosophy . 148 
Symposium, an American 285 

T 

Taft, ex-President, on prosperity and criminal law 95, 256 

Tarkington, Booth 52 

Teachers 

Needed 173 

Obligation of 175 

of Columbia 185 

Science and religion 185 

Students* opinion of 187 

Twofold work 175 

Theology versus science 197 

Times Square incident 201 

Tolerance, growth of, etc 198, 203, 205, 262 

Turkish description of social duties 150 

Twain, Mark, quoted 27, 48, 65 

U 

United States Bureau of Education 163 

United States 

Her unique periods 338, 339 

Her obligation 339 

Her responsibility to Europe 353 

University of Michigan professor on national weak- 
ness 313 



372 Index 

V 



PAGE 



Van Dyke, Henry 89 

Vice-president of trust company on Wall Street ideals 300 
Vitae Lampada, Henry Newbolt*s poem . • ^77 
"Votes for Women" 75 

W 

Wade, George, characterizing Americans . . . 333 

Waller, W. P., on immigration 243 

War and Christianity 217 

War dependent on human nature 264 

place in civilization 265 

Washington on peace 343 

Weaknesses in contemporary life 306-324 

Wealth 

High cost of living 24 

Love of money and display 21, 283 

Menace of 273 

Testimony by editor of large weekly paper . . 216 

Wellington, Duke of, on habits 180 

Wells, H. G., on immigrants 227, 230 

Welton, J., on theory of education 157 

Wesley 44 

West Point Academy 181 

Whitman, Walt, regarding Americans . . . .331 

Wilde, Oscar 7 

Wilson, Woodrow, quoted and referred to 

58, 79, 152, 329, 352 

Winchester schoolmaster testimony 166 

Wister, Owen, regarding literary criticism and Amer- 
ica 47>33i 

Wordsworth, quoted 8 

Work, hours of, in college 183 



Index 373 

PAGE 

World affairs, American opportunity in . . . . 351 
Wu Ting Fang, characterization of Chinese . . 283 

Y 

Yankee humor and notions 11,13,63 

Yellow Sea incident with Scotchman . . . . 117 
Young Men's Christian Association 

Acting secretary quoted 243 

Witness of officials in West and South . 290, 314 

Work and classes for immigrants .... 238 

Z 

Zimmern, A. E., defines America 340 



The American Books 

A Library of Good Citizenship 

TO vote regularly and conscientiously and 
never to have been arrested for disorder 
is not the be-all and end-all of good citi- 
zenship. The good citizen is he or she who bears 
an active hand in cleansing and making merry 
the black spots of the neighborhood; who cher- 
ishes a home however small; who takes an 
increasingly intelligent interest in all that con- 
tributes to the country's welfare, and feels a 
keenly patriotic hope for the future of the nation. 

For such citizens the American books are 
designed — a series of small volumes on current 
American problems. The keynote of the series 
will be the discussion of distinctively American 
movements and questions connected with the 
future prosperity of the United States. 

The series was planned long before the great 
war, but it has derived added importance from 
the position which that great struggle has given 
America on the face of the globe. The United 
States, standing aloof from the suicidal blood- 
shed of the Old World, has necessarily become 
the peaceful arbiter of the earth's destinies and 
the flywheel to keep the world's industry re- 
volving. 



An inquiry into the meaning and tendency of 
American civilization to-day is thus not only a 
matter of interest but of patriotic duty. The 
publishers wish the American books to be a 
series of brief, authoritative manuals which will 
attempt to lay bare some of the problems that 
confront us to-day; written in popular terms that 
will inspire rather than discourage the casual 
reader. The series should prove not only of 
great interest to all American citizens who wish 
to aid in solving their country's pressing prob- 
lems, but to every foreigner visiting this country 
who seeks an interpretation of the American 
point of view. 

The publishers wish the American books to 
be written by the best men, and to this end they 
seek the widest publicity for the plan. They 
will be glad to receive suggestions as to appro- 
priate titles for inclusion in the series and will 
welcome authoritative MSS submitted from any 
quarter. In particular they submit the plan to 
the consideration of the American colleges where 
the problems of the country are being studied. 
In science, literature, business, politics, in the 
arts of war and the arts of peace, the publishers 
will seek writers who have stood for fearless 
achievement or equally fearless failure, who will 
build up A Library of Good Citizenship. 

{For complete list of volumes in 
this series see opposite title page.) 




THE COUNTRY UFE PRESS 
GARDEN CITY, N. T. 



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